How We Got Our Names, Not Pseudonyms

*this is an excerpt from a bigger piece I'm writing about my friendship with my good friend, J.J.


I think our names—first, middle, and last name(s) along with the names that we weren’t ultimately given by our parents—are significant in knowing someone. I’m not considering this from a numerology sense but in a melodic-spirit way. Perhaps it’s our minds, specifically mine, creating yet another distinctly human construct (such as linear time, malice, or God), but I believe people somehow or another end up behaving the way their names sound coupled with the way their faces look. It’s just one of my many unscientific theories of life, something J.J. and I excel in manufacturing. One of my favorite all-time J.J. Theories On Life is that you can’t trust a people, a culture, that lives in a peninsula, eats a form of soup yet doesn’t have some form of eating or soaking utility similar or equivalent to bread or a tortilla.

But back to names, J.J. and I are similar in that we were named after our fathers. It could be argued that we were destined towards a rebellious nature shortly after we were popped out of our mothers’ wombs once we were yawningly named after our dads—like we felt compelled, throughout our pubescence and young adulthood especially, to be that much more different than our spawners.

J.J.’s birth-given first name is Gerald (for his privacy, I won’t put out his full name). Instead of going by Junior, Gerald Jr. or Jerry Jr., his family chose to call him J.J.

My full name is Juan Manuel Alvarado Valdivia. My father, to his credit, did not want to name me after him but wanted to call me Huascar. In Quechua, the language the Incans and their Andean descendents presently use (my family es Peruano), the name means “Sun of Joy”. Huascar was the second to last Incan emperor, dethroned by his half-brother, Atahualpa, in a bloody civil war that occurred when the Spanish conquistadors landed on the empire. Huascar, being the last full-blooded Incan emperor, was said to be the favored ruler by the majority of the Incan peasants. It could be that these reasons were why my father wanted to name me after him. He was talked out of by my mom since it was an unusual name, even in Peru. Plus, my paternal grandfather was also named Juan so there was a sexy line of succession to continue (it ends with me). My cousins tell me I should be thankful because a popular juerga, a slang term in my ancestral homeland, is huasca, which means to be shit-faced drunk.

At times, I believe that even though I wasn’t named after the second to last Incan emperor, that I took and churn within me the spirit that the name would have entailed.