Mexican surnames or Mexican family names are the hereditary names which predominate in Mexico in North America. They are very similar to Spanish surnames owing to Mexico’s extensive colonial history. Following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in the early 1520s, much of the native Aztec and Nahuatl-speaking peoples here were wiped out by the introduction of European diseases and as this occurred Spanish settlers brought Spanish surnames to what was termed New Spain. Many Spanish-sounding surnames were adopted over time to conform to colonial rule, though some indigenous surnames still survive today.
Prior to the discovery of the Americas in the late fifteenth century, Central America was dominated by Mesoamerican empires such as those of the Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs. These people had very different surname practices to those which dominate in Mexico today. They were largely replaced from the sixteenth century onwards as a result of two simultaneous processes. Firstly, the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire and the rest of Central America between the 1510s and 1540s, leading to an influx of tens and then hundreds of thousands of people from Spain who brought Spanish surnames with them.
Secondly, as the Spanish arrived they brought European diseases such as measles and smallpox with them which decimated the natives of Central America. Thus, as the Spanish increased in number, the natives decline precipitously, leading to a complete transformation of the surname landscape of Central America.[1]
This was further compounded as the remaining natives eventually adopted Spanish-style surnames in order to conform to colonial rule. Therefore Mexican surnames are very much a western hemisphere extension of Spanish surnames. This is more the case in Mexico and countries like Cuba which were extensively settled by the Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than some other Latin American nations like Argentina, the latter of which has more people of Italian descent than Spanish and the surname landscape of which reflects this colonial history.[2]
Castilian Spanish history
A page of Gramática de la Lengua Castellana (1492)
Many of these Mexican surnames were influenced by the Castilian branch of Spanish, a language which was still very varied at the inception of the sixteenth century, with dialects such as Asturian, Galician and Catalan spoken in different parts of Spain. However, in 1492, the same year Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas, the Gramática de la Lengua Castellana, or Grammar of the Castilian Language, by Antonio de Nebrija, was published in Spain, beginning the process whereby the Castilian variant of Spanish became the vernacular. It was gaining ground by the time of the conquest of Mexico and so Mexican surnames are more Castilian based that are many Spanish surnames in different parts of Spain itself.[3]
Castilian Spanish dominance
While Castilian Spanish became dominant in Mexico from the sixteenth century onwards and Hispanic surnames were either imported as more and more Spanish settlers arrived, or as the natives Hispanicized and adopted surnames derived from Spain, some native surnames have survived. These are in the native Nahuatl language family. They usually focus more on describing an individual and might be rooted in character traits, often comparing a person to an animal of some kind, like 'fast like a rabbit' or some such. Linguistically one can typically identify these owing to the prevalence of ‘z’ in Nahuatl names and also the occurrence of ‘tl’, which does not typically occur in Romance language surnames. Hence, examples of Nahuatl surnames in Mexico today include Azcatl, Itzcoatl, Tlatoa or Zitlal.[4]
As with many other Romance language countries in Western Europe, or countries that were colonized extensively by the Spanish, Portuguese, English and French, there are a number of clear surname conventions in Mexico. Specifically, Mexican surnames tend to fall into four different categories as follows:
Patronymic surnames such as Hernández (‘son of Hernando’) where the surname indicates a patrilineal descent.General Bernardino Caballero 1868Occupational surnames which emerged to describe a person in line with the work that they did. For instance, Caballero is a surname which describes someone who had an ancestor who worked with horses (caballo) in some way, perhaps being a cavalry fighter or knight.
Toponymic or geographical surnames that describe where an ancestor came from. Aguirre, for instance, is a surname of Basque origin which means an ‘exposed place’ or ‘prominent place’, perhaps describing the fact that an ancestor hailed from a mountaintop village or some such place. Others are more precise. De León, for example, is a surname held by Mexicans who had an ancestor that hailed from the Kingdom of Léon in north-central Spain.
Descriptor surnames are ones which emerged to describe the physical features of an ancestor and then stuck as a surname. For instance, Rubio, a very common Hispanic surname all across Latin America, means that an ancestor had fair or blond hair.
Common Mexican surnames
The most popular Mexican surnames tend to be:
Hernández – This is the most common surname in Mexico. It is a patronymic surname and means ‘son of Hernán’ or ‘son of Hernando’. As estimated five million or more of Mexico’s 126 million people, or one in 25 people, have Hernández as a surname.
García – With over three and a half million Mexicans carrying Garcia as a surname, this is the second most popular Mexican surname. The meaning is disputed. The simplistic explanation is that it is a patronymic surname meaning ‘son of Garze’, though it may have a Basque or even Gascon origin of some sort as well, with Garze meaning ‘young’ in Basque. It is unsurprising Garcia is so common in Mexico, as it is the most common surname in Spain.
Martínez – The third most common surname in Mexico. It is very similar to Hernández, being a patronymic surname meaning ‘son of Martín’.
González – This name has a Gothic and Visigoth origin. Similar to the name Hernandez, it too is Patronymic . The fifth most common surname in Mexico. Nearly three million Mexicans are called González, a name which means ‘son of Gonzalo’, through this may also be an occupation-derived surname meaning ‘soldier’ or ‘noble warrior’.[5]
Famous people with Mexican surnames
Porfirio Díaz.
Agustina Ramírez – Also known as "the lady in black". She gave 12 sons to the 26th president of Mexico, Benito Juárezto help defend the Mexican Republic from a French intervention.[6]
Porfirio Díaz – Mexican military dictator from 1876 to 1911. Diaz means ‘son of Diego’.[7]
Rosario Castellanos – A poet and author who was one of Mexico’s leading literary figures between the 1950s and 1970s. Castellanos as a surname is a toponymic one indicating an ancestor’s origins in the Castile region of central Spain.[8]
Guillermo del Toro – An acclaimed Mexican filmmaker. His surname del Toro literally means ‘of the bull’. It may indicate that an ancestor was a bullfighter or that an ancestor worked with bulls in some other ways, or it could be a descriptor name which emerged to describe someone as having a bullish disposition, although the latter is less likely.[9]
↑Antonio de Nebrija and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, ‘On Language and Empire: The Prologue to Grammar of the Castilian Language (1492)’, in Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 131, No. 1 (January, 2016), pp. 197–208.
