Puerto Rican surnames are the surnames held by people who hail from the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, or who are part of the extensive Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States and other countries. Because of its extensive colonial history and settlement by Spain as one of the key parts of its Caribbean possessions, Puerto Rico’s surname landscape is effectively an extension of that of Spain itself. A minor difference is a greater emphasis on retaining the maternal surname along with the paternal surname in Puerto Rico and other Hispanic countries in the western hemisphere such as Cuba, than is typically the case back in Iberia.
History of Puerto Rican surnames
The Taíno people predominated in Puerto Rico in pre-colonial times, as they did in other parts of the Caribbean along with the native Caribs. Both groups were utterly devastated by the arrival of the Spanish and the introduction of European diseases such as smallpox and measles that followed. In some parts of the Caribbean more than 80% to 90% of the native Taíno and Caribs were dead within a century of the Columbian discovery and those that remained were absorbed into the Hispanic culture of the settlers over time. As such, native naming practices disappeared virtually entirely in Puerto Rico in early modern times.[1]
This ensured the rise of Spanish surname practices in Puerto Rico and Spanish surnames like Sánchez, Rivera, Martínez and del Toro began to proliferate here from the sixteenth century onwards. This was not hugely impacted on by recent developments as Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States following the Spanish-American War of 1898, though admittedly some Puerto Rican surnames have become more Americanized in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. This is especially the case amongst the Puerto Rican community in New York City and other parts of the United States.[2]
Puerto Rican naming conventions
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Puerto Rican surnames differ somewhat from their forbears in Spain in that they place an almost equal emphasis on the paternal and maternal surnames, in contrast to Spain where the emphasis is on the paternal surname to a much exclusive degree. A good example of how this works comes from the well-known actor, Benicio del Toro, a native of the town of San Germán in Puerto Rico. His full name is Benicio Monserrate Rafael del Toro Sánchez. His father’s full name was Gustavo Adolfo del Toro Bermúdez, while his mother was Fausta Genoveva Sánchez Rivera. Therefore, Benicio’s name incorporate the paternal surname element from his father’s full name (i.e. del Toro) and part of the surname from his mother’s full name (i.e. Sánchez). Such naming practices can and do lead to long Puerto Rican surnames on an official level. Therefore, in practice many people use the paternal surname as their shorthand surname, leading, to stick with our example, to Benicio Monserrate Rafael del Toro Sánchez becoming more simply known as Benicio del Toro.[3]
Most popular Puerto Rican surnames
The most popular Puerto Rican surnames tend to be the following:
- Sánchez – A patronymic surname meaning ‘son of Sancho’. This is the most commonly found surname in all of Puerto Rico.
- Rivera – A topographical surname which became used to describe somebody who hailed from near a riverside or riverbank in Spain.
- Días – This is a patronymic Hispanic surname which means ‘son of Diego’ or ‘son of Didacus’. The fact that it became such a widely found Hispanic surname in Spain or parts of its American empire is in part owing to the fact that many Jewish conversos (converts) at the time of the Spanish Inquisition in late medieval Spain adopted this name.
- Rodríguez – A name with a dual meaning. On the one hand, it can be a patronymic surname effectively meaning ‘son of Rodrigo’. On the other, it is also a descriptor surname which means something akin to ‘rich in glory’.
- Narváez – This is a toponymic or habitational surname, one which emerged as a way of describing someone who came from Narvaez in the Ciudad Real region of Spain. This is in the Castile are of south-central Spain and so the prevalence of the name in Puerto Rico indicates the large level of settlement and colonisation of the Caribbean island by Castilians centuries ago.
These five Puerto Rican surnames alone make up approximately half a million people in Puerto Rico out of a total population of not much more than 3.25 million. Hence, two out of every thirteen Puerto Ricans have one of the above surnames.[4]
Famous Puerto Ricans
- Rita Moreno – A Puerto Rican actress who became the first Latin American woman to win an Academy Award in 1961 when she won a Best Supporting Actress for her performance in West Side Story.[5]
- Roselyn Sánchez – A Puerto Rican singer, actress and model from the capital San Juan.[6]
- Luis Guzmán – A Puerto Rican actor famous for collaborating with the directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Soderbergh in many films.[7]
- Ricky Martin – A well-known Puerto Rican singer from the capital San Juan. Martin’s surname is indicative of many Puerto Ricans living in the United States in that he Americanized it for career reasons many years ago, his actual Christian and surnames being Enrique Martín Morales.[8]
Explore more about Puerto Rican surnames
- Puerto Rican Research at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Caribbean, Births and Baptisms, 1590-1928 record collection at MyHeritage
- Caribbean, Marriages, 1591-1905 record collection at MyHeritage
References
- ↑ Who Were the Taíno, the Original Inhabitants of Columbus’ Island Colonies? Smithsonian Magazine
- ↑ Puerto Rico. History Channel
- ↑ Benicio Del Toro. IMDB
- ↑ Puerto Rican SurnamesPuerto Rican Surnames
- ↑ Rita Moreno. Biography.com
- ↑ Roselyn Sánchez. IMDB
- ↑ Luis Guzmán Revives the Gomez Legacy in Netflix’s Adaptation of the Addams Family. Latina.com
- ↑ 30 Years Una Tradición | Ricky Martin. Hispanic Heritage Foundation