Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
The Starbucks barista calls out “Joe, grande latte for Joe!” It takes him two tries before I remember I’m Joe and go pick up my coffee. A minor episode in the long history of non-Anglo immigrants changing their names after moving to America.
If your family immigrated to the United States in the 19th century and/or you took middle-school social studies in the States, you’ve probably heard that officials at Ellis Island often changed newcomers’ names, either because they couldn’t spell them or because they wanted to make them sound more American. In fact, authorities in New York never actually wrote down anyone’s name, they just checked each immigrant against the ship’s passenger list, which would have been compiled by employees of the steamship companies. That means that your grandpa Szymańczyk turned into Simmons before he even set foot on the boat. My case, though, is less about forced reinvention than about bureaucratic drift. Names are bearers of our identity, history, and culture, but a lot can happen when they are run through the machinery of another culture’s bureaucracy.
I was born in Mexico City, and my parents named me Leonel Giovanni García Fenech. It might sound a little baroque to Americans, but having four names is standard in Spanish-speaking countries. And it can be surprisingly useful if one of your last names happens to be García, the most common surname in Spain and the second most common in Mexico. Or if you were my former co-worker, who shared a name with someone convicted of running over a child while drunk. That was the first thing anyone saw if they Googled her, so an extra name or two could have spared her countless awkward explanations during job interviews.
As the firstborn, I was named after both of my grandfathers: Leonel hints at my father’s Spanish Jewish ancestry; diaspora families with the name Yehuda often used variations of the translation for lion, the traditional symbol for the Tribe of Yehuda. Giovanni, on the other hand, came from my Sicilian grandfather, and is just the Italian version of John.
Same with my last names: García is my father’s, Fenech my mother’s. I didn’t find out until I was an adult that Fenech is not actually Italian, as my family always assumed. It’s Maltese, it means rabbit, and it’s one of Malta’s most common surnames. Furthermore, it turns out my family has been mispronouncing it all along—it’s FE-neck, not fe-NECH. Famous people named Fenech include the ’70s soft-porn actress Edwige Fenech and, more recently, Yorgen Fenech, a Maltese businessman currently facing criminal charges for corruption, money laundering, and the murder of a journalist.
In Mexico, everyone called me Giovanni, never Leonel. (I only recently learned it was because my dad couldn’t stand his own father.) When we moved to the U.S. I always introduced myself as Giovanni. I never understood why Americans were embarrassed by their middle names—except for that time when President Barack Obama joked that he envied Willard Mitt Romney being able to go by his middle name. The punchline being, of course, that Obama’s is Hussein.
When I was sworn in as a U.S. citizen, the clerk surprised me when he announced I could now change my name to whatever I wanted. “Even Ronald Reagan!” he joked. (Not quite as weird as it sounds, as Reagan was still in office.) I almost said, “OK, let’s do that!” but thought better of it. Caught off guard, I simply asked him to drop Leonel. Four names only seemed to confuse Americans, and I never used it anyway, so why not make life easier? That’s how I became an American named Giovanni Garcia Fenech.
But the cut didn’t solve any problems. Everyone I met still called me “Gio” without asking. My girlfriend’s grandmother went with Geronimo. I also often received mail addressed to Giovanni Garcia French.
And of course, the bureaucrats still weren’t having it. When I got my driver’s license, the DMV insisted on cramming everything into a “first, middle, last” format and turned me into Giovanni F Garcia (sans acute accent). The passport office, trying slightly harder to keep the order of my names correct, made Garcia my middle name (again, no acute accent) and Fenech my last. In typical Gen X fashion, I was apathetic about the mess. Oh well, whatever, never mind. I just started hyphenating my last name to Garcia-Fenech and left it at that. Nobody seemed to care. The bank cashed my checks.
But there were other things happening in the world. In response to 9/11, Congress had passed the REAL ID Act, requiring a new type of identification to board domestic flights (because nothing terrifies a terrorist like having to spend a day at the DMV). However, since the feds didn’t fund it, nothing happened, and I didn’t even hear about it until 2019, when the government announced that, this time for real, you’d need Real ID to fly. Like a sucker, I believed them and decided it was time to fix my documents. (It’s been postponed twice since then. The new deadline is now 2027, wink wink.)
I could have used this as an opportunity to change my driver’s license to match my passport, but convenience won out. Every important document I had—Social Security, bank accounts, marriage certificate, school records—listed me as Giovanni F. Garcia, and the thought of having to change all of that made me dizzy. Thankfully, the passport office didn’t object.
In November 2024, my wife and I decided to move to Spain (you can guess why). We could do this because she’s German, and as an EU citizen she’s allowed to take her spouse along. As we researched our move, I discovered that Latin Americans can apply for Spanish citizenship after just two years of residency, instead of the usual 10 for others. Only catch: I needed a Mexican passport, and didn’t have one—or any Mexican documents, for that matter.
The consulate in New York happily issued me a birth certificate, but balked at a passport. They explained that my birth certificate listed me as Leonel Giovanni García Fenech but my American ID said my name was Giovanni F. Garcia. Never mind that they were the ones that had just given me the certificate. And so, to Spain I went, with my wife, my butchered name, and my American passport.
We’d been warned about Spanish bureaucracy, and I pictured Dickensian clerks with sleeve garters and green eyeshades demanding documents in triplicate. But what we encountered in Seville wasn’t that different from the American equivalent: bad websites, confusing instructions, long lines. They did enjoy stamping documents, but they were no better with names. My new foreigner’s ID listed me as Giovanni F García—acute accent restored!—but when I opened a bank account, I discovered my first name had become “Giovanni F.” Not Giovanni, not Giovanni plus middle initial. Giovanni F. Still, better than “Gio.”
Not ready to give up on an expedited European passport, I decided to visit Madrid to try my luck at the Mexican consulate there. If I couldn’t get a Mexican passport with my full name, I’d at least get to visit some world-class museums. The good news first: The museums were fantastic. As for the consulate, after a couple of hours of waiting, they called out my full name: “Leonel Giovanni García Fenech!” The official didn’t give me a chance to speak. “Look into here,” he said, pointing to some goggle-like device. “We need to photograph your irises for biometric identification.” Oh wow, this was actually going to work. “Now stand there for your photograph.” I grinned. The joy didn’t last long. “This is provisional, good for one year,” the official explained. “We can’t give you a regular passport until you bring us documentation with your full name. See here?” He ran his finger over the name on my naturalization document. “It just says Giovanni Garcia Fenech. And your U.S. passport is even worse—they’ve changed Fenech to just a single F! Have them fix it and then we can proceed.” I tried to explain that if not even Starbucks can get my name right, what were the chances the American government would? But he wasn’t interested, and there was a long line of people with dependable names waiting to get their irises scanned. Dejected, I went back to Seville with my ever-growing folder of documents under different names.
I spent a few days at home weighing my options. Could my parents find other Mexican documents with my original name? Could I legally change it back in the U.S., or would that just tangle my paperwork in Spain? How much more Kafkaesque could this get? Then something happened that made me reconsider everything. I was standing in line at the local bazar (the Spanish version of a dollar store) when an elderly woman ahead of me asked the Chinese owner her name. “Lola,” she said. “Lola! And how did you get that name?” the woman pressed. The owner shrugged. “People kept coming in asking for a Lola who used to work here, so eventually I just started saying that was me.”