6/ My Name

Have students read the following piece from House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros aloud:

My Name

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.

It was my great-grandmother's name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse--which is supposed to be bad luck if you're born female-but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their women strong.

My great-grandmother. I would've liked to have known her, a wild, horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn't marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That's the way he did it.

And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window.

At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister's name Magdalena--which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least- -can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza. would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do.

Discuss piece as you see fit. Prior to class, look up students' names on a baby name website and find what origin and definition there are for each student. (Ex: My name, Molly, means "bitter." My husband's name, Ryan, means "little king.") Read these out loud also--the students get a kick out of finding out whether or not they believe those names fit their classmates.

Assign a vignette to the students: They are to write their own my name piece. If this is a homework assignment, they also will need to speak with their parents to find out how their name came about; if you are doing this as a warm-up, make sure to have the students do this ahead of time. They can include last names too, if they know the origin of that. Let students know they can include emotions regarding their names too--Did they have nicknames as children? Had anyone made fun of them because of their name? Did they ever wish they had a different name? Etc.

This exercise was originally designed when I found the vignette in my ninth grade textbook; I used it to teach denotation (literal meaning of a word; we talked about "home," and we talked about the baby names definitions) and connotation (emotional meaning of a word; again, the return to "home" and the stories behind the name, the nicknames, the love-hate relationships). I used it last semester with my university students in Intro to Creative Writing in the non-fiction unit. In both instances, as a literature tool and as a creative writing tool, it went smoothly and revealed a lot about my students, which makes it a good early-on assignment.