From their inception, names—including first names, surnames, names of groups, and even story, book, and academic article titles—are embedded with meaning and coded with identity, and over time, they become layered with nuance and memory. In 1992, when I wrote my original article, I named it “Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas,” using Spanish to embed a rhetorical signal to the reader that s/he was being invited into the lived experiences (and legal reasoning) of a Latina. The first of several narratives begins with me as a seven-year-old child in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Thus, the article begins in “Brown space”—that is, the location, the perspective, the idioms, and the cultural references are intentionally racially and ethnically “Brown,” with skin color and phenotype serving as a synecdoche for the Latina/o racial category.

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From their inception, names are embedded with meaning and coded with identity, and over time, they become layered with nuance and memory. This was the first and last sentence in the reflection I wrote in 2013 to mark the twenty years that had passed since I wrote the article, Máscaras, Trenzas y Greñas: Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse, which was the focus of the symposium volume in which this essay now appears.

We, the collaborators in the ongoing Name Narrative projects that are described in this short article, are three Latinas and one Native woman: Irene found Name Narratives to be a salient pedagogical tool in her Introduction to Chicana/o Studies course in Fall 2013. Diana and her colleague, Jeannette Stahn, have used the Name Narrative tool with administrators, teachers and students. Diana and I are a mother-daughter pair who have worked side-by-side in different settings, more recently creating opportunities for storytelling about names and identities.