RECLAIMING OUR NAMEPLATES
Spiking over the last year, I’ve seen nameplates ––personalized necklaces that began as a reinvention of gas-station bracelets and mock license plates inscribed with Lindsey and Ashley–– mutate into a refashioning by none other than the same Lindsey and Sarah.
I remember the hype of nameplates began in elementary school. I would steal glances at the ornate detailing of the older girls’ nameplates in the hallways. I admired from afar, knowing I would only be granted one from the flea market once I came to age.
The act of getting your Latinx, West Indian, or African name on your nameplate is an “insistence on gaudiness and inviolability of our names” as The Nation Institute fellow Collier Meyerson puts it. The inability to find these names in products elsewhere demanded we create our own. In Meyerson’s words, this act was not just an aesthetic choice, but a political one.
By the time I was well underway into puberty and ready to fashion my very own name in gold, I had received notice that I wouldn’t be attending my zoned middle school in West Palm Beach, Florida, but rather I had earned admission to a magnet school in North Palm Beach. Away from the kids in my neighborhood and into an environment of white, affluent families, my mother no longer favored the idea of a nameplate perched above my collar bones. “The kids here will think you’re ghetto,” she said to me. I was devastated, but the idea of not being well-received at a new school was even more devastating. I pushed the long-awaited dream aside, and moved to silver Juicy Couture charm bracelets.
Years later, after moments of painful clarity in the face of PWIs throughout middle and high school, I attempted to strip myself of the years I spent whitewashing my expression, and of course, my fashion. An attempt to reclaim my roots, so to speak.
Whether coincidental or (more likely) not, this journey began right as I noticed the upsurge of baby hairs being laid on my Instagram feed, “streetwear” on every high fashion magazine headline, and nameplates making their way into businesses, like the Instagram famous The M Jewelers.
I became enraged with the idea of predominantly white business and consumers snatching my culture. I stomped into the flea market with my mother and got a nameplate made. I decided to get my mother’s name, Carina, inscribed on mine ––a way to carry both her and her indigestible name with me.
Now here’s the complication: giving up my nameplate my first time around was an attempt to assimilate. But is getting one now also a form of assimilation? Did I only want a nameplate because white people deemed it cool? And if not, if I did it in spite of them, am I not still allocating a level of power to them regardless? In a way, I am still joining them in this trend, even if it was my culture’s to begin with.
And although it is my culture, I also realize my name—a historically Irish-American name my mother chose to be agreeable in English as well as Spanish— doesn’t fit into the category of
inviolable names. These dissonances and entanglements were, for a long time, hard to face.
Going forth, I stand with most commenters of this fad; I’m not going to impose a ban on nameplates. Though what boils my blood is that yet again, affluent white brands like The M Jewelers are evicting the same communities they are appropriating with bogus prices and exclusive advertising.
All I ask for is transparency. Stop changing the language of nameplates to ‘monograms.’ Call it as it is. Help small, black- and brown-owned businesses. Challenge yourself to step foot into a “ghetto” flea market if you yearn to venture into these cultures so desperately.