Identity conflict due to multi-naming among Mazahuas in Mexico

Abstract (English)

Naming a person is the beginning of a life Project, it is a social action not a simple performative one which is grounded in a 6-stage process: inspiration, comparison, test, decision-making, formalization and narration (Aldrin, 2011: 35). However, in many Mexican communities (the Mazahua area, in this case, an ethnic group distributed in two central states of Mexico) there’s a great deal of cases in which, despite naming formalization, a new process of renaming occurs. In the Mazahuan area, there are some cases in which, after examining the main name, parents or a close relative decide by several reasons not to keep it and give a new name to the name-bearer, so the person has an official name and the one he will be known among their acquaintances (and, in some cases, there is a third one related to the religious side). This paper aims to contribute to the studies of Linguistics Anthropology and Anthroponymy as a branch of Onomastics) by presenting the narrative analysis, collected via interview, of 3 men and 2 women (all above 50 years old mazahuans) who bear this kind of names and reflect on their experiences in dealing with the fact of discovering their names are not the real ones. An identity conflict was detected because all of them argue that they could get in trouble with civil or educational authorities.