Guest Voice: My Name Is Now Mine
Changing your name after you've built your professional reputation is seldom easy. But every year, nearly two million Americans take that step. Sometimes the motivator can be positive, like a marriage or adoption. Sometimes it's negative, like a rift or divorce. And sometimes it's just administrative, like clearing up a misspelling. But sometimes, as M. Sebastián Rodríguez describes in his blog, it's the righting of an old wrong.
Names and Other Abstractions
Today, on my birthday, I said goodbye to Clyde and became Sebastián. This is the story behind that decision.
Sep 25, 2026
Growing up in southern and central California, I rarely thought about my Mexican heritage. It was simply part of everyday life. I played Lotería in Boyle Heights with my sisters, cousins, and great-aunts, whose warm smiles and braided hair were the perfect foil for their cheating. I drank my mother’s atole and unwrapped tamales at Christmas. I suffered through hours of telenovelas, waiting impatiently for the closing credits so I could take over the television and play Pac-Man on our Atari 2600. I listened to Vicente Fernández and Juan Gabriel on Radio Bilingüe, their songs blasting across the vineyard rows from my mother’s radio as we picked grapes every summer. And I endured many Sunday mornings when my teenage sisters would pull me out of bed, still half asleep, and nearly drag me around the living room dancing cumbias.
My name, however, carried someone else’s story.
Our parents were immigrants living in an agricultural town in Northern California. By the time my twin sister and I were born, my mother had already chosen our names. I was to be Marco Antonio; my sister was to be named for my mother’s great-grandmother. Hours after our birth, two unexpected visitors arrived.
My parents were not close to the Endemans. Within months, we moved south and never heard from them again.
Nevertheless, I became Clyde, named for a man I never knew, a name with no connection to my ancestry. I spent much of my life explaining the name through references ranging from the River Clyde in Scotland to a “generous couple” who had helped my parents and, finally, to the more awkward truth.
Immigrants to the U.S. often adopt names more familiar to American ears in hopes of easing cultural friction rooted in conscious judgments or unconscious assumptions. Mine produced a curious dissonance in both English- and Spanish-speaking contexts as people tried to place my name within their own histories and frames of reference. I had long sensed the implication beneath the questions. After learning the origins of my name, some friends confided that they had assumed I had deliberately chosen Clyde to distance myself from my Mexican heritage. Their interpretation cut deeply: ever since I was a boy, I have longed for a deeper connection with my cultural roots, yet the name itself made me a stranger within the very heritage I was accused of rejecting.
I still receive inquiries almost weekly from people trying to trace my roots. Where did Clyde come from? Is it a family name? Do you have Scottish ancestors? How did a Rodríguez end up with it? Sometimes the inquiry is immediate; at other times, it arrives after several minutes of conversational reconnaissance. I have become reasonably good at recognizing when someone is working their way toward the question.
For years, I treated the origins of my own name as an amusing footnote. But as I began writing about who or what gets to define us, I found myself confronting personal questions that had seemed long-settled.
As I’ve earned more gray hairs and become a father myself, I now see the circumstances of my naming differently. My father was an immigrant trying to make a life for a large family in a country that was not yet his own. In the Endemans’ request, he likely saw an invitation to make our footing a little more secure during a precarious moment in our lives. Immigrant families often feel compelled to make accommodations of this kind for the chance to belong, to make it in America.
Whatever his motives, I no longer wish to carry the weight of his decision. A name is among the first abstractions assigned to us, long before we are capable of choosing one for ourselves.
Decades later, it’s time to make a choice of my own.
M. Sebastián Rodríguez.
The initial “M.” stands for my first name, Marco Antonio, and honors my mother’s wishes in that maternity ward years ago. Sebastián is my own and draws meaning from my mother’s spiritual life and from values of protection and resilience rooted in our family’s immigrant history. It moves with greater ease between my English- and Spanish-speaking worlds and opens the way to more substantive conversations, rather than allowing an incongruous name to become a barrier.
So how might someone refer to me now? You’ll occasionally see me use M. Sebastián Rodríguez, but only as a byline or in formal signatures to represent the full depth of the name’s meaning to me. I don’t expect anyone else to use the full form. Personally or professionally, I much prefer the simplicity of Sebastián.
The decision has not been easy; I’ve contemplated it for years. Exercising our innate agency begins with recognizing the difference between what has been given or imposed and what remains ours to choose. Even so, a change of this magnitude comes at a substantial cost, affecting nearly every relationship and memory others carry of me. And yet the boy from the fields, the engineer, the friend, the husband, and the father all remain part of the same life.
For those of you who have known me as Clyde for many years, I know old habits take time to change. A name given at birth, or even assumed in youth, accumulates meaning as a life unfolds, becoming a kind of index to the memories others carry of us. A name chosen much later in life holds no such history and only slowly comes to accumulate one of its own. I am grateful for your generosity and grace as that story begins.
Originally published on the author's Substack. Shared here with permission. Visit the author's website at www.msebastian.com.
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