When I was 12, I had a well-intentioned teacher who called roll by making a rhyme out of my last name, Acevedo. He mispronounced all but its last long o and rhymed that with “hot potato.”
How do you say Acevedo? My LinkedIn profile has a recording, here. It’s “AH-suh-VAY-dough.” I have no doubt my homeroom teacher was kind-hearted because he was also my basketball coach, and I’ve had basketball coaches who scared me, while he was someone who made me want to play better, and to hustle.
Still.
What I learned from that experience is that names are very important. It’s a lesson that has stayed with me to this day. As a teacher at UC Berkeley in the College Writing Programs, I make an effort to learn what my students’ names are and how they pronounce them, and I try not to be awkward about it.
Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about names in general, and I’ve often had students say, “Thank you so much for learning my name. I’ve never had that before.” While I’m sad to hear that it’s not universal, I know that my colleagues in CWP do the same, as do my friends who teach elsewhere, and also very many other teachers, prioritizing learning their students’ names and how to pronounce them well.
I’m grateful for the chance as a teacher to honor students’ actual names.
I also want to consider how grateful I am personally for those who honor that I myself have two last names. When I first started back into the work force as a college professor after having been a stay-at-home mom for years, I used my maiden name Acevedo and my married name Butcher. I mainly did it for practical reasons. I wanted those who knew me at UGA in graduate school and others who knew me as Carmen Acevedo, to know that I am now Carmen Acevedo Butcher. However, it was an uphill climb. When I was invited to give talks and such, I’d submit all the information with my three names, but no one ever used Acevedo much. So I kind of gave up. I became Carmen Butcher.
When I became a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul, my husband Sean suggested we make a website so students could have my notes more easily, so we did. But all three names seemed then too long for my website, if I wanted it to be easily memorable for my students, especially from the perspective of teaching English in a country where Hangul was their first script and Korean their first language.
So my website has always been www.carmenbutcher.com. I think today if I had to do it over I’d keep all three. My Acevedo name is that important to me. I know I look light-skinned now, and I’m married to a White man from England. So I very often get slotted into that space, and I can see why.
But, (and this is another reason I try not to assume about my students), as a good, long-time friend said to me recently, “You were so much darker skinned as a kid.” And my mother would always say to me as I was growing up: “You have such beautiful olive skin and complexion.” That is how my identity formed, as that darker-skinned kid who tanned easily playing outside and felt on the margins and/or not-fitting-in growing up in mostly White communities, even as I was proud of my darker skin and loved our summer trips to Miami, to visit my great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins there. I was so proud to eat then and at times at home the Cuban foods of my father’s heritage, and mine. It’s one reason I use more tan-skinned emojis.
Names are complex. Names are sacred. As I began publishing, and admittedly, as society started changing in its attitudes towards names and naming, it became important to me to have my whole self on the cover, even as every book is created by so very many people, and not just one author. For my work and career as a writer, I wanted my whole self, or Carmen Acevedo Butcher there with me. Not to would have felt as if something was missing.
So I looked up to see the history on two last names. I learned that there is a most repulsive phrase for it: “double-barrelled name.” Because of its first use and association with firearms, since 1709, when Richard Steele wrote in the literary and society journal Tatler: “His double-barrelled Pistols.” I prefer “double surname” or simply “two last names.” Many join theirs with a hyphen. I don’t. It’s Acevedo Butcher.
I’m also reminded that today many of my students with Latina, Latine, and Latino backgrounds are honoring their heritage more openly as they include their double surnames in their school records, with the first being their father’s surname and the second their mother’s.
Curious one day to see my author page online, since I’m grateful to be there and wanted to check out my new digs, I couldn’t find myself under the A‘s. My heart sank a little. There I was under Butcher, so I asked the kind people who help me there to please put my author page under Acevedo Butcher. This is also why I’m so thankful when someone I don’t even know emails me to ask, “Do I cite you as Butcher, Carmen, or as Acevedo Butcher, Carmen?” I write back, “Thank you! It’s Acevedo Butcher, Carmen.” And recently, a brilliant, kind, and wise new friend messaged me on social media, “Dr. Butcher,” and I was so thrilled to hear from this friend and to be invited into a conversation with this friend that I didn’t notice until later that there was also right after a second message: “I apologize – Dr. Acevedo Butcher, I should have said.”
I think this kindness reaches so deeply for me because I’ve spent my whole life trying to build selfhood. I started life in childhood trauma that undoes the sacred selfhood, and twig-by-twig, I have been slowly building my own nest of personhood, of dignity, of self-compassion, and of compassion for others.
Meanwhile I was writing a message back, “Please call me Carmen.” However, I’ll not forget that second kind message. As I was reading it, I was thinking to myself: Woah. I hope I can always be so gracious and attentive to others’ names too.
Peace.