Amanda’s Chile Moments

One way that you know you are a foreigner and a stranger in a new place is because your name is weird there.

Okay, so Essenmacher would be difficult for many people in many places. My friend Marion who is from Germany is the only one who thinks our last name isn’t too odd. Essenmacher means food-maker in German, and Marion likes to come over and bake with me, so she thinks it fits us pretty well. And when she prays before the meal, the only word I recognize is “essen.”

But in Chile, my family’s names are weird for another reason: we only have one last name.

Just as we learned in our high school Spanish classes, people in Spanish-speaking countries have two last names, one from their father and one from their mother. For example, my friend Verónica’s full name is Verónica Alejandra Carrera Jara. Verónica and Alejandra are her nombres, her first and middle name as we would describe them in the States. Carrera is her father’s last name, and Jara is her mother’s.

My name is therefore incredibly strange to the poor people who want me to fill out forms that ask for two last names. They deal with it in different ways. The hospital makes the mother’s last name optional, so I can just skip that field when I go online to schedule a doctor’s appointment. The lady who entered my info into the system so I could get a grocery store discount card couldn’t believe it…so she just put her second last name in the place where mine should have gone. Amanda Mead Essenmacher Perez is what my grocery card says!

So you can imagine our shock when we went to get Megan’s Chilean birth certificate and were informed that by law everyone born in Chile must have two last names, and that they must be the last names of the parents of the baby. So poor little Megan was saddled with Megan Hope Essenmacher Essenmacher for the first days of her life. And she will always be legally known as such here in Chile. Thankfully, the American Embassy in Santiago knows how to fix such things when applying for a US passport!