I am using a citation style [lastname, year] and I am citing someone named Beatriz Rodriguez Gonzalez. Do I refer to her as [Rodriguez, 2008], [Gonzalez, 2008], or [Rodriguez Gonzalez, 2008]?
Rodriguez Gonzalez IMHO and FWIW. You are giving the surname of both the fathers and mothers family, which is important in some Hispanic (mainly Spanish IMHO) families…which is why it’s used.
Rodriguez Gonzalez, in this case. Luckily it was a relatively easy one 
Both lastnames are patronymics and neither is used as a firstname, so it’s easy to tell the bits and pieces apart if you’re Hispanic. I had a boss called something akin to José Luis Tomás Andrés and everybody had to ask “which part is what?” (all four words could be firstnames).
I would check to see how other people have cited this person and then just follow along, but the APA blog seems to suggest that you should use the third of your options:
I have a cousin named Jose Luis <I won’t say the rest for anonymity>. 
Actually, a bigger reason is to help differentiate people. If you have two guys called José Luis Rodríguez, one of the easiest ways in which you can differentiate them is by using their maternal lastnames. Other ways include indicating job, location they’re from or a physical characteristic, but these are less… constant. Hair color, height, weight, or even where someone is from vary with time (the first three) and location (the last: in Navarre I’m from Pamplona, in the rest of Spain from Navarre and abroad I’m from Spain).
Pchs, right now there’s only 296162 of those in Spain, plus however many there are in other countries. Half as many as Antonios, those being the most common male firstname.
(Not sure if the link takes you to the gadget with results: if it doesn’t, type José Luis in the big oval and click the Nombre one).
It’s pretty common in Mexico as well. Just thought it funny that you had a boss with that name and thought of my cousin.
In Mexico, where my family is from anyway, generally you see people/families with strong Spanish ancestry and prominent families who use this convention. It’s to preserve, I guess, the fact that the person is from both families. My own family is not one with great ties to prominent Spanish families so we don’t use this convention, generally (when I say ‘we’ I mean the people in the small Sonoran village my family comes from).
Like a lot of this sort of thing it gets changed in translation I think, since what you describe of how it actually is in Spain is more prosaic and logical.
What about Juan Diego Yinglehaimo Herrero?
His name is your name too? 
Depends. Juan Diego is pretty common as a compound firstname (a firstname which includes several words), specifically a reference to Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (aka Saint Juan Diego, simply because most people balk at the lastname), but there is nothing to indicate whether Yinglehaimo is a lastname or a third part of the firstname.
If it is a lastname, then the cite would be for [Yinglehaimo Herrero, xxxx] and if it’s part of the firstname then it’s [Herrero, xxxx].
Hey! :mad:
So as not to confuse Nava unnecessarily: In the US, there’s a children’s song that goes
The name was my attempt at a translation into Spanish, inspired by XT’s post. I had to fudge it a bit with “Jingleheimer”, though, which appears to be a nonsense name with no actual meaning to translate.
Is it possible for “Juan Diego” to be a first name and a middle name? I’m wondering because there are a group of names that can be either (in the US), and it’s not always possible to tell whether it’s a compound name. For example. “Annemarie” is clearly a first name but “Anne Marie” might be a compound first name or a first and middle name and there’s no way to know without asking. ( or possibly getting your head taken off for calling her “Anne” when her first name is “Anne Marie, it’s one name , dammit” )
It can also be a problem for people who live in Spanish speaking countries, but their names are not Hispanic. There are lots of people here in Panama for whom Henry, Chang, or Hassan could be either a first name or a last name. And since some people give their names as firstname middlename father’s-surname, and some give it as firstname father’s-surname mother’s-surname, it can be a problem figuring out which name to list alphabetically. (If you have four names listed you can usually assume it’s firstname middlename father’s-surname mother’s-surname.)
It can be a nightmare trying to be consistent in doing a bibliography with a lot of Spanish citations, since sometimes the original reference doesn’t make it clear which is the surname. One way of clarifying is to capitalize surnames, especially the first surname. Many other people hyphenate the father’s and mother’s surname when publishing in international journals to avoid misunderstanding.
If, in Spanish/Mexican, your mother’s name is often listed along with yours, then it would be pretty public, no?
So a typical English security question like “What is your mother’s maiden name?” would be a poor choice, yes?
The French also tend to CAPITALIZE surnames, which makes things easy to figure out regardless of the name order. Not a bad idea, really.
Thanks all, especially Nava. Rodriguez Gonzalez it will be. BTW, I have two different email addresses for her, both of which were rejected. Or I would have asked her.
I knew the song actually But the response remains the same: is Jingleheimer last or firstname? In English, if it was part of a compound lastname there would normally be a dash, but in Spanish dashes are rare. You can even have a lastname like Fitz-James Stuart where there’s both a dash and a space but it’s all a single lastname (and it’s an actual one: the previous Duchess of Alba’s first lastname; thank you, Scottish monarchy!).
Juan Diego can be first+middle, and in fact any Juan Diegos living in the US will get it split so in government paperwork whether they like it or not. There are two main kinds of compound firstnames, in Spanish:
- those where all the words form the name of a person, or one of the “names of Our Lady”. Every Xavier and every Borja are Francises but in reference to different saints, you need the Xavier or the Borja to indicate which saint (no “tail” usually indicates Assisi, which himself is the one the other two got named after). Nowadays a Juan Diego named after the saint would fall under this.
- those which are several separate names but get strung together. José and Luis are two names, but it is rare for someone who has both to use only one, so we think of José Luis as a compound name. For Saint Juan Diego, his firstname was actually one of this kind since there was no St. Juan Diego at the time Anne Marie would be one of these.