My name has an uncommon spelling, one first-generation Mexicanos would never pick: V-i-c-k-i-e. Ie. “ie?” people say, how odd. “Is it short for Virginia?” My parents did not pick the last consonant. They only had the concept: baby girl, alive, unimpaired mover and dancer. Mom says the black nurse who provided the spelling had big white teeth and smelled like peppermint gum.

Above all, my name is a reference- to Victoria, my other half who left LA much before I did.

Victoria my oldest sister who never got to beat me up with her left hand while she curled her hair with her right. I never tagged along anywhere with her and her hoochie friends to “Purple Rain” or to the Glendale Galleria. She dreamt her way to heaven so I could be the big sister to our two younger brothers. So I could beat them with one hand and drink my morning milkshake with the other.

She left so I could take my younger brother Jesse to watch, “Batman Begins,” and to pimple-skinned parties on Jaboneria Street. I’m named after a ghost for whom my mother makes birthday cakes out of Styrofoam discs, lovingly covered with real icing and ballerinas every one of her 36 birthdays.

Victoria took a look at south east LA and said, “Chale, I’ll catch you on the rebound.” Neither she nor I got to be a chola, or a cha-cha, or a new waver. She left me here with thick glasses in fourth grade, these stories and a name to live up to, everyday. Don’t. Fuck. It. Up. Girl.

I was born in Inglewood (“always up to no good”), near LAX, where I would make a maiden voyage to visit colleges 17 years later. How it makes sense - that every night or so, I dream of fly-away places, a deluged mélange of everywhere I’ve lived or seen: an Italian mansion in a Chiapas jungle, with a view to the Caribbean from my sleep.

Victoria- I don’t blame you for not staying. It was all mean-ugly girls through high school, then silent throbbing lack in college. Grad school was warm and got me ready for all work in life. There I learned how to dance cumbia ballenato, or is it “vallenato”? You tell me, girl.

I scribbled across your photo face as a toddler- you in the kitchen on top of our marigold painted table. That’s all I’ve ever had for your likeness. How lovely you might look today, all flirty thirties with our wavy hair and long Mendoza eyelashes, living your life somewhere near silver planes.

And my last name? Vértiz. An accent on the “e” thanks to a Spanish from Spain college professor. I’ve also spotted a certain street named, “Doctor Vértiz” in Mexico City with the accent on the ‘e’ too, melting my guilt over the initial gachupin influence over my young college mind. “But Chata,” says dad wearing cop Ray-Bans with a paper bag in his right hand, “Our last name comes from the name ‘Veretti.’ No sabes que somos Italianos?” Of course we’re Italian. That’s why mom speaks Nahuatl like a sailor. I love how Mexicans always find a blue-eyed granny somewhere in our lineage, but never an Indio or Moor or Moreno. This ass is not Indian, I’ll tell you that much.

All I can tell you is that I was very at home when I arrived in Morocco in 2001. All black arching eyebrows and olive pink skin like mine. They were impressed with my gnawan music dancing abilities. I didn’t have it in me to tell them all their songs sounded just like cumbias.

* tocaya: a girl with the same name as me

by Vickie Vertiz
San Francisco, CA

“Why did you call me Helen?” It is a question I have asked my parents probably thousands of times and they have a deliciously pretentious explanation for my name, and as I’ve grown I have proudly started to perpetuate it. Helen, a Greek name meaning light, (as well as being the face that launched a thousand ships), was chosen for the fact that I was born two months prematurely weighing two pounds two ounces, light by anyone’s definition. It suits me, as one of those no-nonsense, pragmatic names that can carry you through any stage of your life. My mother tells me of their determination to find a name that wouldn’t go out of fashion by the time I was eighty three. Having grown up amongst a generation of Kylies, Staceys and Billy-Jos, I understand the logic behind it. I like having a name that instantly belies my gender, but not my age.

I will be honest and admit, with no offense to my parents, that when I was younger I wanted to be a Becky or a Holly or a Vicky, anything with a y really. There was a girliness to those names, a softness that as an eight year old drowning in my own precociousness, I wished I had. There were no shortened forms of my name, no jolly nicknames. I was a constant, and, at the time, it was maybe too mature a name for my nature. It needed nurturing.

As for my middle name, never has it seemed more fitting. Louise means warrior, and from the second I was born it feels as if I have had to fight. As a child, I was a regular at accident and emergency, riddled with severe asthma attacks and often arriving on the verge of turning blue. A year and a half ago, I shattered a disc in my lower spine, and currently, spending a day out of the house has turned into a battle. There was no small amount of prophecy on my parents’ part.

The adult me loves my name, and revels in its practicality. I may never win any prizes for glamour but, like my real life self, my name offers a steeliness and a strength of character that I have worked hard to develop. There is tough love in the name Helen.

The real beauty of my name, as with the scientific beauty of faces, lies in its symmetry. Helen Dring lies on the page beautifully, a perfect ten letters.

by Helen Dring
Liverpool, United Kingdom