LAUSR

Surnames of Pueblo individuals recorded by Franciscan and secular priests in the various mission pueblos of New Mexico reveal details of some ethnographic interest. Pueblo names, as is true in other Native American societies and communities, relate or refer not only to the unique and personal, but often to characteristics of the community’s social organization. Names are symbols of social identity and relationships, but they also might reflect categories or positions in the community’s social organization. Nicknames aside, surnames recorded at various pueblos in the northern Rio Grande valley of New Mexico suggest that they occasionally reveal aspects of a community’s social structure, including apparently extinct as well as existing clan names, ceremonial or ritual behavior, and membership in sodalities, “cultural memory,” residential mobility, and other details that have not been recorded or perceived by ethnographers among New Mexico’s Pueblos.