CAN’T SAY A NAME? JUST GIVE IT A TRY.

Names are personal. No one is supposed to take them away from you. But that was not the case for Latinos in this country, especially in the 1950s, depending on where you grew up.

Local musician, songwriter, educator and activist Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez told a story in the documentary, “Singing Our Way To Freedom” produced by Paul Espinosa, about how teachers commonly changed (or anglicized) the names of Chicano/a, Mexican American children. His name went from Ramón to Raymond. At the time he was a student in the second grade at Margaret White Elementary School in Blythe, Calif., a small farming town near Arizona.

Ironically, the same thing happened to my dad, Ignacio. Except it was a

Castañeda is deputy editorial and opinion editor at The San Diego Union-tribune and on Twitter, @presspasslc nun at St. John’s Catholic School in Savanna, Ill., in 1952. She told the entire eighth-grade class that they should just call him “Jim.” So for one year all the students in the class called the only Latino boy in it “Jim.” He only recently told me this story, and my blood was boiling. I thought to myself, “How the heck would I feel if someone just changed my child’s name because they couldn’t pronounce it?” I asked my father if he was upset, and he said, “no.” He explained how he was sent off to Illinois from El Paso, Texas, to live with relatives. His guardians did not speak English so they never went to the school to complain.

He added that back home in El Paso, everyone had Spanish names, so the teachers were accustomed to learning to pronounce the names correctly, but in rural Illinois, that was not the case.

As he got older, joined the Army and starting working, his name morphed into “Nacho” or Nash