Rodríguez

After the Visigothic settlement of the peninsula the local population took up a patronymic habit and gave it a Latin ending: -icī, a genitive meaning son of, welded onto the father's forename. Rodericus, the Latinised Germanic form behind Rodrigo, took that suffix and came out the far side as Rodríguez. The same machine turned Fernando into Fernández, Gundisalvus into González, Dominicus into Domínguez, Nunnus into Núñez and Pero into Pérez. Rodríguez describes nobody at all. It is a sentence with the verb left out.

The suffix then broke along the peninsula's language lines. One father named Fernando produced Castilian Fernández, Catalan Ferrandis, Galician and Portuguese Fernandes and Basque Fernanditz: four surnames, one man. Catalonia often kept the bare forename with no ending at all, Ferran, while the Valencian Country kept the suffix, and the contact zone bred hybrids: Fernàndez, Fernandis, Ferrandez, Ferranis. Rodrigo's own short form, Roi, took the ending too and gave Galician Rois, which Castilian writes Ruiz. Ruiz and Rodríguez are the same claim about the same man, said twice.

Not every -ez is the genuine article. Because z and s collapsed into one sound in American Spanish, names that were never patronymic acquired the prestigious ending anyway: Chávez for Chaves, Cortez for Cortés, Valdez for Valdés. Those are spellings, not descents. Rodríguez has the real -ici- behind it, which is why it turns up in Galician documents as a live, working patronymic long before it settles down into a fixed family name.

The medieval system regenerated itself every generation and kept nothing. Álvaro, son of Rodrigo, was Álvaro Rodríguez; Álvaro's son Juan was not Juan Rodríguez but Juan Álvarez. The surname was a fact about one man's father and it expired with him. The Rodríguez a reader can search for today exists only because that machine jammed, because a household somewhere kept the ending its grandfather had earned and stopped recomputing it. In time the recomputation stopped, and many of those patronymics settled into family names, among them some of the commonest surnames in the Spanish-speaking world today.

Rodríguez is not thickest where Castilian was made. Across Spain roughly one person in forty-nine carries it, but the density sits on the Atlantic north-west and the islands: the Canary Islands at one in twenty-one, Galicia at one in twenty-four, Asturias at one in twenty-six. Castile and León follows at one in thirty-nine, Andalusia at one in forty, Extremadura at one in forty-one. The wet green provinces that fed the emigrant ships are the ones that hold the name most tightly.

Galicia has the paperwork to explain it. Patronymics appear in local Galician documentation from the ninth century and become popular from the twelfth, and the Galician set is unmistakable: Rodríguez from Rodrigo, Rois from its short form, Froiz from the Germanic Froila meaning lord, Vieitez from Bieito, Méndez from Mendo, Estévez from Estevo, Vázquez from Vasco by way of Velasco, Yanes from Iohannes. Galician swallows intervocalic -l-, -d-, -g- and -n-, which is why Páez and Vázquez look worn down beside their Castilian cousins. Lugo is the only province in Spain where López outnumbers every other name.

Alongside the patronymics the Galician register keeps names off the workbench and the road (Ferreiro the smith, Carpinteiro the carpenter, Besteiro the crossbowman, Cabaleiro the knight) and names off the body and the border: Gago the twangy, Tato the stutterer, Bugallo the fat, Franco and Portugués for the incomer. Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao (1886–1950), the Galician writer and politician, wore the standard arrangement: the patronymic half the parish shared, then a second name doing the actual identifying.

Spain registers a person with a given name and two surnames (the father's first surname, then the mother's first surname) in the Registro Civil, and a woman does not change hers on marriage. Since 1999 the order can be reversed, provided every sibling in the family is entered the same way; the traditional order is still chosen 99.53 per cent of the time. From 2013 a registrar settled parental disagreements with the paternal name as default, and since June 2017 parents have had to sign an explicit agreement stating the order they want.

The system's escape hatch is exactly what a name this common needs. When the paternal surname identifies nobody, both are used, and then the second one quietly takes over on its own. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, elected head of the Spanish government in 2004 and again in 2008, is simply Zapatero, the name he inherited from his mother's family. Pablo Ruiz Picasso and Federico García Lorca went the same way, and so did Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba. It is a courtesy of speech and not of law: García Lorca is still filed under G, never under L.

Spanish America legislated the join outright. The Ley de Registro Civil of 1870 required birth certificates to show the paternal and maternal surnames linked by y, the copulative particle the Spanish had adopted in the sixteenth century for precisely this ambiguity: Luis de Góngora y Argote, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Rosa Rodríguez y Riquelme (1781–1850) carried it: half-sister to Bernardo O'Higgins and executor of his estate, and known even so as Rosa O'Higgins.

The rule bites on incomers too. A foreigner naturalising as Spanish is obliged to take a Spanish-shaped name, so a one-surname Briton called Sarah Jane Smith is entered either as Smith Smith or as Smith Jones, borrowing her mother's maiden name to fill the empty second slot, with Sarah Jane read as a single composite forename. Running the other way, a foreign paternal surname tends to drop out of use: the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Hughes Galeano, whose father was British, is known by the Spanish half of the pair. Now and then both stick: Arantxa Sánchez Vicario kept them while her brothers Emilio and Javier went by Sánchez alone.

The half of the name a family chooses is regulated too. A Spanish forename may be simple or composite, and a composite counts as one name rather than two: José Luis is not a first name plus a second, it is a single unit, which is why José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero can lose neither part of it. Until the 1960s children were customarily baptised with three forenames, one of them the saint of the day, though only the first was used; three or more is now largely a royal habit, as in Felipe Juan Froilán de Todos los Santos.

Two names cross the sexes freely. Girls are named María with a shrine or a devotion appended (María del Pilar, María de los Ángeles, María de la Luz) and then drop the María in daily life to answer to Pilar, Ángeles or Luz. Boys take María in second place behind a masculine name, as in José María Aznar, abbreviated in writing to M. or M.ª; girls take José in second place, as the skier María José Rienda does. Jesús works the same way in both directions, and shortens to Sus or Chus.

Under Franco the law confined parents to Christian names and to names reckoned typically Spanish, Álvaro and Jimena among them, and barred diminutives and anything that confused the sex of the child. What remains of that today is a single rule: the name must not insult the child. Diminutives are now registrable, but the affectionate forms in -ito and -ita stay inside the family. A Spaniard does not put the nickname on a business card the way an American writes Bill Gates; the exception is a name adopted as an artistic one, as Juan Ignacio Duato did in becoming Nacho Duato.

Spanish naming was most eloquent about the people it could not name. Abandoned children were a standing problem for civil registrars: some were given the name of the town where they had been found, and because most were reared in church orphanages many were entered as Iglesia or Iglesias, or as Cruz, or as Blanco, blank rather than white. In Aragón the foundling was given Gracia or de Gracia, on the reasoning that the child had survived by the grace of God. Catalan registrars used Deulofeu, made by God, and Castilian its cousin De Dios.

The cruellest option was Expósito, from the Latin expositus, exposed. It announced the abandonment in the child's own name and passed the announcement to the next generation as a mark of low caste; not until 1921 did Spanish law let a holder of Expósito change it. A child whose father was unknown or who refused recognition took both of the mother's surnames instead, and could interchange them at will. Set against that register, Rodríguez states the one thing that mattered: there was a Rodrigo, and he owned the child.

Higher up the scale the anxiety ran the opposite way. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the particle de was fixed to a surname to advertise descent and, more urgently, to deflect the suspicion of Jewish or Moorish blood: Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and the grandee Francisco Sandoval Rojas restyling himself Francisco de Sandoval y Rojas. By the eighteenth century the nobility had taken up the French use of de as a rank marker, and since commoners bore it too, it settled nothing. In eastern Castile, Álava and western Navarre it had never meant more than from: the village a family walked out of.

The name took root north of the Pyrenees as well. In Belgium the House of Rodriguez d'Evora y Vega held the office of Great Breadmaster of Flanders for generations and carried the title Marquess of Rode, an Iberian patronymic naturalised into Low Countries nobility with two Iberian place-names, Évora and Vega, trailing behind it. This line climbed without ever shedding the -ez, and dragged the geography of its origins along with it as proof.

The men who sailed west wore a name of one standard shape (a patronymic, then de and a place) and Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, Pedro López de Ayala and Vasco Núñez de Balboa all carry it. So does Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo (1497–1543), the navigator whose second name, not his first, is the one that stuck. The patronymic put him in a crowd of thousands; the tail on the end of it made him findable.

That shape had a domestic version for anyone whose patronymic was too common to serve. In Álava, in the central parts of Navarre and in northern and eastern Castile, a bearer pinned his village to his surname with de, and the result counted as one name rather than two: a man surnamed López whose family came out of the valley of Ayala used López de Ayala. Where Basque and Romance had long shared the ground the two languages fused inside the single surname, as in López de Arriortúa, where the original family name sits second and the patronymic in front of it. Rodríguez is precisely the kind of name that formula was built to rescue.

Read by the rules of the Registro Civil, the painter Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599–1660) carried Rodríguez de Silva as his paternal surname and Velázquez as his maternal one, joined by the disambiguating y. The world kept the last word and threw away the rest, so the greatest painter of the Spanish court is catalogued as though the first half of his name never existed. Picasso and Lorca would be made the same way three centuries later; Velázquez got there first.

Others carried it plainly and needed no second name to hold them apart. Ventura Rodríguez (1717–1785) built as an architect under that bare form, and Felipe Rodríguez (1760–1815) composed under it in the classical era. Later bearers spread across the Spanish record without pattern: the sociologist Luis Rodríguez Zúñiga (1942–1991), the Redemptorist missionary Juan Campos Rodríguez (1907–1995), the basketball player Emiliano Rodríguez, born 1937, the cyclist Joaquim Rodríguez, born 1979, and Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira (1879–1955), who murdered the daughter she had conceived as a eugenics experiment.

Some trades preferred that a Rodríguez not use the name at all. The guitarist Juan Serrano explained why flamenco artists seldom used their proper ones: the music belonged to the Gypsies, respectable Spain held it to be in the hands of criminals and bandits, and a girl who wanted to sing was told she wanted to be a prostitute. So the stage name kept the family out of it: Pepe de la Matrona for a midwife's son, Perico del Lunar for a mole, Tomatito for the son of a red-faced Tomate, Sabicas for a boy's passion for green beans, Paco de Lucía after his Portuguese mother. The bullring did it too: Joaquín Rodríguez Ortega (1903–1984) is remembered as Cagancho, and by neither of his surnames.

The distribution the emigrant ships left behind is lopsided. As of 2014 some 25.9 per cent of all known bearers lived in Mexico, one resident in fifty-two; 10.3 per cent in Spain; 9.8 per cent in Colombia; 9.2 per cent in the United States; 8.4 per cent in Venezuela; 5.9 per cent each in Cuba and Argentina. Spain now keeps barely a tenth of its own surname. Inside Mexico the weight is northern: Nuevo León at one in twenty-nine, Coahuila one in thirty, Zacatecas one in thirty-two, San Luis Potosí one in thirty-four, thicker with the name than Castile ever was.

The name carried its bearers with it. Simón Rodríguez (1769–1854) taught and philosophised in Venezuela; Manuel Rodríguez Erdoíza (1785–1818), lawyer and guerrilla leader, is counted among the founders of independent Chile, his maternal surname doing the work the register designed it for. In the Philippines the surname reached about 1.6 per cent of bearers, roughly one Filipino in seven hundred, arriving by Spanish colonial administration rather than by descent, and keeping the particle y today only in police records.

The spelling travelled less consistently than the people. The record carries three standing forms (Rodríguez, the unaccented Rodriguez, and Rodrigues, the Portuguese equivalent) and none of the three marks a different descent. Galician surnames were widely adapted to Spanish orthography as the paperwork Castilianised, so the medieval -es endings and the modern -ez sit side by side in the same archives. The concentrations abroad can outrun anything at home: in Cuba the name is thickest in Ciego de Ávila at one bearer in fifteen, with Sancti Spíritus, Cienfuegos, Holguín, Artemisa and Granma all at one in eighteen.