My Names

On my way back home from traveling abroad this summer, I found myself in front of a customs declaration, like I have on many other occasions. But instead of quickly flipping through the questions, one prompt gave me pause. On one of the first screens, the customs form asked for my first name and my “family” name.

So I wrote down the last name I’ve had my whole life and the name I was given at birth. I wrote down my family name — my father’s family name.

In the United States, like in many other English-speaking countries, that’s just the way it is. When you’re born, you take your father’s last name. Amongst most heterosexual couples, the wife takes the husband’s last name. This is not codified into law, but rather carried on my tradition and by custom. But why?

This practice of the wife and child taking on the husband or father’s surname was formally developed within the institution of civil coverture and predates this country’s founding in English common law. It was brought across by the first European settlers and archaically, it stems out of the socio-political idea that women become the property of their husbands at marriage.

As a society, I'd like to think we’ve evolved beyond that belief. Today, despite the fact that women are still vastly disadvantaged by workplace and reproductive inequality, our society is more gender equal than it ever has been before. In the realm of coverture, we’ve finally started to accept the idea that women aren’t the property of their husbands, but equal and necessarily consenting members of any union. Again, there’s still a long way to go toward true equality, but this is progress

Yet, I found myself stuck on this customs form because when I wrote down what the legal response was, I would effectively be writing my mother’s family out of my name. For all the effort she has put into raising me and taking care of me for twenty years, every time I passively accept this social order of coverture, I am ignoring my mother’s contributions and my mother’s family.

The very trip I was coming back from was to visit her family in Costa Rica — my birthplace — but the customs form and the American natal-marital naming traditions left no space for any acknowledgment of their role in my life.

I can no longer stand by and continue that erasure.

My mother’s family is just as much a part of my life as my father’s is, and since you wouldn’t be able to tell that from the customs form in front of me or any legal identification, I decided to slowly start the process of taking on a new name. This year, I’ve started to change my name on social media, school documents, in my byline, and hopefully one day soon, legally. Rather than changing who I am, I’m for the first time fully representing myself and including both my parents’ last names. After all, that’s my family, and their surnames together are my family name.

This is a small change, but it means the world to me.

Writing down and seeing my new, more complete name reminds me every day of the contributions that both my parents and the fact that neither one of them can passively be erased from my history. Not in fact and not on paper. I am just as much Barham as I am Quesada. Now, my name reflects this.

As a society, we need to get rid of this seemingly benign vestige of civil coverture that effectively erases the role of women in heterosexual relationships and in families. It’s outdated, it’s wrong, and changing it requires little if any effort.

In the airport that day, I typed in the name that is on my passport — legally that is still my name. Soon, though, that too will change so that next time I’m asked for my family name I can be honest and pay respect to both sides of my family: both beautiful parts of my past and both indelible from my name.

Patrick C. Barham Quesada ’21, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government concentrator in Pforzheimer House.