What Are the Most Popular Names These Days?
By the DiversityInc staff
November 19, 2007
Can you guess what the most popular surnames are these days? If you didn't include Garcia and Rodriguez, you don't know much about the changing demographics of this country.
Garcia and Rodriguez are among the top 10 most common surnames in the United States, reports a new Census Bureau analysis. Garcia jumped from No. 18 in 2000 and Rodriguez moved up from No. 22 in 2000. And Martinez nearly ousted Wilson for 10th place. The latest name count also showed a spike in Asian names, noting Lee as the 22nd most common surname in the United States. Lee is often described as the most common surname in the world, reports The New York Times.
The study, only the second ever conducted by the Census Bureau, found that while Smith remains the most popular surname, Latino surnames are increasingly edging out historically common Anglo names. The number of Latino surnames in the top 25 doubled to six, the study shows.
"It shows that we are getting stronger," said Luis Padilla, a Cuban banker who emigrated from Colombia to Miami 14 years ago, to The New York Times. "If there's that many of us to outnumber the Anglo names, it's a great thing."
(See also: Don't Apologize for Your Accent and All About Accents: What You Told the White Guy)
Immigration has been the major factor prompting the rise in the Latino population in the United States. During the 1990s, the number of Latinos in America grew 58 percent and accounted for 13 percent of the country's 281,421,906 million population in 2000; today the number of Latinos tops 44 million and they are close to 15 percent of the population. People of color, largely fueled by the Latino population explosion, now are the majority in California and are expected to be the majority of the U.S. population by 2050.
Another major contributor to the rise in surnames is the relaxed pressure on immigrants to Anglicize their Latino and European names, encouraging people to hold on to their native surnames. "[This] gives the Hispanic community a standing within the social structure of the country," Reinaldo M. Valdes, a board member of the Miami-based Spanish American League Against Discrimination, told The New York Times. "People of Hispanic descent who hardly speak Spanish are more eager to take their Hispanic last names. Kids identify more with their roots than they did before."
The study also showed an association between some surnames and ethnicity. Nearly 90 percent of Washingtons, 75 percent of Jeffersons and 66 percent of Bookers in America are black; only one in five Smiths are black.
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