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.