Call me by my name: Peru promotes use of indigenous names in public records

Indigenous Peruvians often have one name at home and another, usually Spanish, for official purposes. Now registrars are being urged to embrace native languages

Dan Collyns in Lima
Thu 4 Apr 2019 08.00 BST Last modified on Thu 4 Apr 2019 08.01 BST

Julio Cusurichi may have won the prestigious Goldman environmental prize for helping create huge reserves for Amazon tribes, but in his home village he is still known by the Shipibo-Konibo name he was given as a child: “Pino”, or hummingbird.

Like thousands of indigenous Peruvians, Cusurichi has one name at home and another on public record: his identity card and all other documents bear only his “Christian” first name.

For years, Peruvian registrars often refused to recognize indigenous names, favouring Hispanic names or English-sounding names like Roosevelt or Jhon (sic).

But that practice is starting to change thanks to an initiative by Peru’s national register, Reniec, to retrain registrars and catalogue names from the country’s 48 indigenous languages.

“Many registrars tended not to register indigenous names, so parents felt the name they had chosen wasn’t valued,” said Danny Santa María, assistant manager of academic research at Reniec. “We want to promote the use of indigenous names and recognise the proper way to write them on birth certificates and ID documents.”

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