A Mexican state with a tradition of giving children odd names
ON A SCORCHING Saturday in Jonuta, a poor region of the tropical Mexican state of Tabasco, a woman sits in the shade by a river cradling her granddaughter. The child’s name is Sirse, a twist on Circe, a Greek sorceress who turned her enemies into animals. “I saw the name in a novel and I liked it,” explains Sirse’s mother, Nabil. The trend towards greater variety in names is a global one. In Tabasco, giving babies unusual names, often based on Greek ones, is a proud tradition.
It impressed Amado Nervo, a Mexican poet. In every family “there is a Homer, a Cornelia, a Brutus, a Shalmanasar and a Hera,” he wrote in “The Elysian Fields of Tabasco”, which was published in 1896. Rather than scour the calendar for saints’ names, he wrote, parents of newborns “search for them in ‘The Iliad’, ‘The Aeneid’, the Bible and in the history books”. Andrés Iduarte, a Tabascan essayist of the 20th century, concurred. Tabasco is a place “of Greek names and African soul”, he wrote, endorsing the cliché that the state has similarities with Africa.
Nearby Yucatán and Veracruz also have a fondness for unusual names. But it is strongest in Tabasco, the home state of Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. It may have originated as a creative way to resist pressure from the Catholic church to name children after saints. Tomás Garrido...