Tagle. What a weird last name. Hardly common in the US, I’ve never met another Tagle before. Not shared by too many Filipinos in the motherland, eiher (guess there weren’t as many conquistadors with that last name, or from the Santandar province in Spain?). Also the name of a little-known Chilean president. The Tagles were an aristocratic line in Spain, and even though I’m pretty sure it isn’t really my paternal grandfather’s last name, it seems like the gross accumulation of wealth has lived on in that line.
Funny things you see on the internet. I really wish I could stop looking for / at that never-known family, but it’s hard to escape it with the ubiquity of social media like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. I think for a minute, what if I knew others with this last name? Grew up with them even? I may have been wealthier, or more comfortable, sure… but at what expense? What would be “better”? To be fighting for social justice far away in the belly of the beast, or to be in the homeland without having to do a day’s work, but living off the spoils of a semi-feudal, supremely unjust system? What does even having a tie to that name mean, anyway, when all I know of it is the conspicuous consumption and privilege I’ve seen others experience, without any of the personal relationships that must, somehow, still bind that family together?
It’s a name that means nothing to me, but that marks me in the world. I wish I could be rid of it… but what would I be without it?
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