Names Changing

My grandmother gave me a name in the first tongue. Metzi. She had considered it carefully - she was a woman who considered everything carefully, the midwife’s discipline, the habit of attending to what is actually there. She named me for the moon, which is the night sun, which is the one that lights the way for the things that travel in dark hours.

She did not know she was naming me for what I would become. She thought she was naming me for the gift she saw in me: the ability to see in the dark, to navigate what others could not. She was not wrong. She was just more right than she knew.

Metzi. That was the name for thirty-five years. The childhood name, the training name, the name Telpochtli used when he called me out of the group of a dozen to stand before the skull-pile and show them what I could do. The name I kept in the obsidian cave, in the decade of learning the dead, in the embrace and the rising cold and the first years of practice.

Then the burning, and the road north, and the centuries of a corridor where no one used that name because no one there knew that language, and the name became what all unused things become with time: still real, still present, still mine - but carried rather than worn. An interior name. The one I use when I speak to myself in the first tongue in the hours before the sky goes light.

The second name came the way colonial names always come: attached to a language someone else decided was the language of record. In the mission system, in the documents, in the interactions with the Spanish-speaking world that were unavoidable in the territories where I moved, I was addressed in Spanish and answered in Spanish, and the name I gave in that tongue - Mireya - was the one that stuck. Not forced. I chose it. I chose it because it was mine, because I shaped it to hold something of what Metzi was, because a name you choose for yourself in an alien language is still a self-chosen thing.

Mireya is me. I want that to be clear. I am not mourning the Spanish name; it is not a colonizer’s imposition. It is a name I built for myself in the available material.

The third layer came with the Americans: Miria Garcia. Document-legible, census-legible, the version that does not flag immediately in a bureaucratic system organized around a certain idea of what names look like. I use it rarely. It is a tool, not a self.

Here is what I have found, across five centuries of accumulating names: the thing that persists is not in the names at all. The -tzin register, the reverential spacing calibrated by relationship and occasion - I still know it, still use it, still feel the difference in my chest between the moment that calls for it and the moment that would be false. The difrasismo habit, the pairing of two images to say the third thing they point toward together - this is not a technique I practice. It is the structure my thinking runs in. It was there before I knew what it was called. It will be there when every name I have carried is replaced by whatever the next century requires.

Languages leave their shape in you. Five centuries of accommodation to the shapes of other languages have not removed the original architecture. The first tongue is not the tongue I use most, but it is the tongue I think in at the deepest level - the level where the decisions that matter happen before they surface into words.

The moon and the name of it, the dark and what travels in it.

Metzi. That is still the one I go home to.