So a hotel owner in New Mexico is under fire for asking some employees to change their name. Actually, he was asking employees (presumably from Old Mexico) with hard to pronounce names to go by something else while answering the phones.
Is that really so wrong? He wasn't asking them to literally change their name, but just to pick a nickname for work. I don't think it is racist to try to provide good customer service. We are all off-put when we are talking to someone and have no idea how to pronounce his or her name.
In grad school the Asian kids and the Indian kids didn't mingle much outside their own groups and I think the hard-to-pronounce names were part of the problem. How do you start up a conversation with someone when you are afraid of offending him or her by slaughtering the name?
When the waves of immigrants first came to America on boats the U.S. officials didn't tolerate difficult names. If your name was unpronounceable to an American you were given a new name.
Immigrant: "Mhy neme esk Petrovich Groskyovski."
Customs Official: "Peter Grossman, welcome to America."
I think this really helped in the assimilation process. When you have a melting pot, you need something to tie all the flavors together. In our case it is the English language. If your name just doesn't work in English and you want to live the the United States, come up with a nickname. And for God's sake learn the language. If I decided to go live in Japan for some reason, I'm pretty sure I would be fluent in Japanese within a year.
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4 years ago
