What's in a Name

I recently wrote a four-part series about illegal immigration. It was basically a story about a young Mexican man who came to America with his family when he was 9-years-old but was deported after he had graduated from high school, where he played on a state championship football team and graduated third in his class.

Anyway, the man deserved to be deported. He does not dispute that.

Still, he decided to sneak back into America because most of his family is here and his hometown in Mexico is fraught with poverty and violence from a drug cartel. His journey back here was filled with disappointment, despair and disbelief that he would actually make it back to his family.

It was a compelling story.

As you might suspect, it was a risk for this man to share it, so to protect his identity, I gave him the fictional name of Pablo.

I was amused this week when after a routine press conference the local district attorney asked me if the fictional name of Pablo was inspired by the sidekick in the book Don Quixote. He was talking about Sancho. I guess he hadn't read the novel in a while.

Anyway, I laughed when I shared with him where I got the name Pablo. I actually named the immigrant after Pablo Sandoval, third baseman for the San Francisco Giants.

I thought the name was appropriate because Sandoval's nickname is the Kung Fu Panda, after the main character in the 2008 movie. If you remember the movie, the Panda succeeds against great odds, just like the immigrant I interviewed did.

It would have been good use Santos, a character from one of the most famous novels of all time, as the name for the illegal immigrant in my story. But knowing what little I know about that novel and the movie Kung Fu Panda, Pablo somehow seems more fitting.