Again somebody called me “Mr. Ferrer” today. So tired, really. Twenty years abroad, and it still bothers me that so many people just assume that Germanic/Anglic naming conventions are universal in this planet. And I am not just speaking of non-academics and people with a, hm, let’s say “local horizon.” I have also seen this kind of mistake among scientists and internationally-oriented professionals, including the newspaper The Economist calling Gabriel García Márquez “Mr. Márquez” (I still shudder when remembering that one; the sloppiness of that newspaper in things like these was one of the reasons which made me give up my subscription years ago).
So, what’s the deal? Well, Spanish and Valencian/Catalan names simply do not follow Germanic/Anglic conventions, by which I mean the strange (sorry) tradition to completely drop the mother’s surname and even expect that the wife will renounce her surname. Those two conventions are quite strange for us. We keep both family names, that of the father and that of the mother. That means that my name is Carlos, my first family name (which comes from my father) is Alós, and my second family name (which comes from my mother) is Ferrer. Other examples, to mention a couple of economists, include Andreu (first name) Mas (father’s family name) Colell (mother’s family name), Xavier Sala Martín, or Fernando Vega Redondo. (Of course, the ordering is still patriarchal, but less so than completely dropping the mother’s name.) And, by the way, when Spaniards marry, nobody changes his or her name. The husband keeps his two family names, the wife keeps her two family names, and the children receive as first family name their father’s first family name and as second family name their mother’s first family name. So all family names survive at least two generations.
It is very simple, really… so I wonder why people keep calling me “Mr.Ferrer.” It seems that, in the English- or German-speaking world, people simply focus on whatever is the last group of syllables in your name, to the exclusion of everything else, no matter where you might originally hail from. So some people tend to call me “Mr. Ferrer,” because they see that as the last part of my name. Although this would make my mother happy, it is simply incorrect. My first family name, the one I expect people to use, is Alós. I can be called “Alós-Ferrer” (see below about that dash) or “Alós”, but definitely not “Ferrer.”
Although we expat Spaniards tend not to make a fuss of it, after a while this mistake bothers the hell out of most of us. Sorry. Would you like me taking your surname, splitting it in half, and calling you by the second half? (I’ve actually done that a couple of times for pedagogical reasons). So, to avoid these annoying confusions, many of us working abroad (and also many of those working in Spain but publishing internationally) employ one of a small number of standard strategies.
The first is to make a subtle change to our pen names, adding a dash (-) between the first and the second family name, so that people realize that both are important. Hence, you see Carlos Alós-Ferrer, Andreu Mas-Colell, Fernando Vega-Redondo, etc., but it would be equally correct if you called us Carlos Alós, Andreu Mas, and Fernando Vega, which is precisely what happens in Spain. Still, many people ignore the dash and keep mistakenly using the second surname to the exclusion of the first (ultra-short attention span, or ultra-short working memory?).
Unfortunately, adding that dash makes some people think that it comes from our wife and that it implies that we are married to somebody whose family name is what comes after the dash. That has nothing to do with it. Again: when Spaniards marry, nobody changes his or her name.
The second strategy is to simply drop the second family name entirely. That’s what my former PhD advisor Carmen Herrero Blanco does, using the short form Carmen Herrero in her publications. Some people using this strategy have a double (first) name and then completely “americanize” their names by abbreviating the second part of it as if it were an American middle name (which it isn’t). For instance, from the actual name Ana Begoña (double name) Ania (first family name) Martínez (second family name) you end with Ana B. Ania.
The third strategy really adds to confusion and should be plainly banned (rant mode on here): incredibly, some people drop their actual main surname. Like my coauthor and friend, José Carlos (that’s the name, again a double one) Rodríguez (the first and most important family name, no matter what he says) Alcantud (the second and less important family name), who decided to give preference to his uncommon second family name over his very common first family name (especially because the second starts with an “A”, so he gets to be first in the alphabetic author list of all papers, even before myself (!!!)). Hence, he signs as J.C.R. Alcantud. Granted, that might be individually rational, but it makes people think that what is nothing but a mistake (using the last family name) is correct… Regrettably, this also happens with some prominent figures because in Spain, some family names are really common (like, say, García or Rodríguez), so for some people with a common first family name and an uncommon second family name, preference is given to the second, as the press often did with former president Rodríguez Zapatero.
Oh, and a final note. Carlos Alós Ferrer, Andreu Mas Colell, and Xavier Sala Martín are (partially) Spanish versions of Valencian/Catalan names. In Catalan, both family names are separated by an “i,” which means “and.” Hence, the actual Catalan name is Xavier Sala i Martín. If for whatever the reason you want to give priority to the Catalan version and keep this “i,” then you might end up with Xavier Sala-i-Martín…
P.S.: This rant (for a rant it is) is an updated version of a rather old entry I used to have in my previous University page. When I deleted that one, I moved the entry here.
Carlos' Ramblings 