Este articulo fue publicado en The New York Daily News y trata sobre los nombres curiosos de muchos Domincanos.

The naming game

How Usnavi, Nanky and Yenifel were born
By SETH KUGEL



Nanky Garabito is named after the King. Nat King Cole, that is.
It was 1963, in the Dominican town of in the Dominican town of Cotuí, when a son was born to Emilio Garabito. The father was a big fan of an African-American singer popular on the island in those days, the sharp-dressed guy who sang "Unforgettable." He named his son in the singer's honor.
And that is how Nanky Garabito got his name. The singer's name, of course, was not Nanky Cole, but Nat King Cole. According to Nanky, who owns a tire repair shop on White Plains Road in the Bronx, his father had never seen it written before and spelled it the best he could.
It's a story many Dominicans - and Puerto Ricans and Cubans and Venezuelans and more - will laugh at knowingly.
Though the Dominican Republic has produced plenty of Altagracias and Pedros, many parents take a more creative route, anything from combining the two parents' names to making up something that sounds nice to a creative spelling that either mistakenly, or on purpose, misspells an English name or phrase.
Yes, we're talking about you, Yenifel (that's Jennifer), and you, Dervis (that's Davey, with a heavy Cibaeño accent). It's not always the parents: Sometimes a government official makes the mistake on the birth certificate.
The creative naming process has taken center stage, literally, in the new musical "In the Heights," which takes place in Washington Heights, the center of the city's Dominican community, and has gotten for the most part rave reviews from critics.
The main character is a man named Usnavi, a legendary name from the Caribbean that comes, supposedly, from expectant parents reading the word off American warships. It's not the first U.S. Navy-inspired name to hit the mainstream.
In "The Dirty Girls Social Club," a 2003 novel by Alisa Valdés-Rodríguez, one of the main characters is named Usnavys - this time, a woman.
In the real Washington Heights, Moraima López went the combination route when her daughter was born 20 years ago. She named her after both her ex-husband, Jorge, and herself. The result: Jorayma.
"We wanted to give her a uniting name, for our union," she said. "Names of human beings have power, they have their own energy." The switching of the "i" for "y", by the way, was on purpose: "Y" means "and" in Spanish, further adding to the uniting effect.
For their second child, they went with Jomalys, which she said was a character on a soap opera at the time. She also has a son named Jacob. Moraima herself claims to be named after a 1940s radionovela character in the Dominican Republic.
The rash of names has even sparked a Web site called Nombres Dominicanos Insólitos (Unusual Dominican Names), which can be found at jose.llibre.googlepages.com/nombresdominicanosinsolitos. The page lists more than 11,000 names that are supposedly real. Just the "A" page has 1,124, including Abelarminio, Adovincula and Ayxindry.
Meanwhile, in the Bronx, after 44 years, Nanky Garabito takes pride in his name and in the story behind it. He also delights in people's confusion and double takes. "It seems like a name from some other country that's not Hispanic," he said.
So one would think that Nanky would bring the creative naming process to the next generation, perhaps naming his son Steen or Vono. But he didn't, and his business, named for his son, is the proof: Mike Flat Fix. (No word on what happened to the apostrophes, but that's another story.)