the story of my last name
What escaping a Vermont winter with a trip to Spain reveals about my parents, our ancestry in the Philippines, and the cost to own a Porsche.
I zipped my passport into my jacket’s chest pocket as my dad dropped us off at Boston Logan Airport for our two-week trip to Spain. My last name, written on it, says Babala.
BABALA
ALEC SUVA-VIOLA
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
I’ve learned that it was assigned by Spanish colonial administrators who were cataloguing the Philippines in 1849, distributing surnames alphabetically by town. Secondary towns got “B” names. My great-great-grandfather received this Tagalog word that roughly translates to, “a sign of danger.”
It was snowing in Vermont when we left, and I was ready to get out. I’d been getting tired of our things breaking in the cold. The ATV that I use to plow wouldn’t start. The house main line froze. And worst of all, the warning lights on my 2012 Porsche Cayenne Turbo came back.
Two months ago I wrote about how it might have been a weak battery. Well, it seems like the engine of this foreign car wasn’t ready for this culture shock. From the factory it was built in Germany to where it was driven the past 14 years in Texas, its taking this car some time to adjust to its new life in Vermont.
The indie shops specializing in Porsche’s in Vermont needed service appointments scheduled weeks in advance, and they were inconveniently located two hours north or inconveniently open for two days of the week.
There are air-cooled Porsche specialists like Bullfrog in Burlington, but they no longer worked on the newer water-cooled cars like mine. And the restoration shops like RPM in Vergennes, that work on restoring classics, had plenty of other fun and valuable projects taking their focus. Places like these wouldn’t be able to turn around a more common exotic without me being left carless for undeterminable amount of time.
Before I even bought the car, I knew I wanted to learn how to work on cars with my own hands like how I do with bikes. I wanted to understand how all the parts work, spend the money I saved to purchase the tools, and use my time to put it all together. But with no garage, two feet of snow, and sub-zero temperatures, this car would be sitting outside in the elements on jack stands until long after the snow melts.
And I don’t want more work right now, I just want to drive and enjoy the damn thing!
I was starting to feel like my car might be the wrong type of foreigner, especially in a state that drives primarily Subarus and Toyotas. This is not an unfamiliar feeling to me — I’m Filipino American in a state that’s 94% white. And worse, I grew up next door in New Hampshire, which doesn’t carry any street credit to true “Vermonters” with family roots here. Times like these I wished I was more from Vermont, so I can know a guy to bring my car to.
With no other options living in the Upper Valley on the VT-NH border, my only other choice was to drive home, two hours south to Nashua on the NH-MA border. The “Gate City.”
The Porsche service center is five minutes from my parents’ house where I grew up. I thought it might be worth paying the brand tax for the convenience of scheduling and having the confidence that my warning lights will be properly sorted. And if it needed to be left for multiple days, I could spend the nights with my family.
I remembered when they opened their first location twenty years ago. It made sense why it opened in Nashua — wealthier Massachusetts residents could hop over the border to save on no sales tax. I imagined that they would leave work early on a Friday, drop off their car for service, then take a loaner car to drive up north to ski for the weekend. I’ve driven past the building and their fleet of cars on Route 3 thousands of times. I never once believed I would have a reason to step foot inside, because how could I ever afford one?
And there I was, standing in the empty waiting room at 7:30am on a Wednesday.
One wall was floor-to-ceiling glass overlooking the showroom — Guards Red 911s, Gulfblue Caymans positioned like sculptures. The side of aspiration.
The opposite wall looked into the service bays where black Cayennes and white Macans sat lifted on hydraulic lifts, technicians in pressed uniforms working beneath them. The side of reality.
Between these walls hung the story they wanted you to see. Grainy photos of the original 356 hand-built in 1948. Le Mans victories spanning seven decades. The Zuffenhausen factory where every Porsche had been assembled since Ferry Porsche decided that if no one would build the sports car he wanted, he’d build it himself.
The family name “Porsche” carries so much weight. Prestige. A cohesive story of obsessive consistency. A philosophy since they were founded. Commitment to building a car that does one thing perfectly rather than many things adequately.
I watched my Cayenne, which had never seen snow before, roll into the service area and get lifted in its bay. I’m paying to be part of this community, but what role did I play? Maybe I was paying for the race car drivers, to make the 911 GT3 RS possible, to make those cars in the showroom and the story they told come to life.
As we boarded the plane to Madrid, I checked again for the passport resting next to my heart and I wondered: what makes us part of a family? Is it the story we adopt? Is it the last name we take at marriage?
Or is belonging something we inherit — in migrations made generations before we were born and as simplistic as surnames assigned by government officials?
foreign families
“Life is love and love is sacrifice.”
— Antoni Gaudí
On Montjuïc mountain in Barcelona, we stood in the center of Teatre Grec, as Ben got down on one knee in front of Tess under the rain and the perfectly overcast light. We were there to photograph this moment; two friends committing to belong to each other with a ring and a question.
It was my first time in Spain, and my intrusive thoughts were relentlessly asking me a question about love that I was getting very tired of hearing, “How much do I love my car?”
Since we first arrived, I was obsessively counting the number of Porsche Cayennes that I’ve seen parked or being driven. New ones, old ones, they all belonged to these narrow streets built centuries before cars existed. I was thousands of miles away and I missed mine.
A few days before in the United States, I was on the phone with the Porsche service advisor discussing what the repair could total — up to a third of what I’ve paid for the car!
I couldn’t believe that opening the cams to replace a solenoid and a sprocket would cost this much. My first thought was: how can I not spend this money? Could I find these parts online for a quarter of the price? Should I just go back to an indie shop and leave my car there for a month?
I could spend this money on something else. That’s at least three round trips to Spain. Or our house’s mortgage in Vermont for a few months. I could also invest it and watch my savings grow. Or I could be selfless and donate it to a cause I believed in.
Or I could convince myself that this cost is fair. Maybe it is as necessary as paying for the surgery to save the life of someone I love?
I mentioned the repair costs to my dad. He said, “That’s a lot of money. But as long as you love it.”
Growing up, dad owned various cars — Toyotas, Jeeps, Hondas — but the Europeans were the ones that stuck with me: an early ‘90s Mercedes E-Class wagon, an early ‘00s BMW 3 Series sedan, and his favorite BMW 5 Series sedans.
He’d tinker with everything — building bikes from scratch, assembling model planes, teaching me how a PC works. As an engineer, he understood that every mechanism had purpose and worth understanding.
He showed me how to claybar and wax the paint, insisted on touchless washes to avoid swirls, and reminded me to always pick the tier that sprays the underbody to wash away the road salt and fight winter rust. He was constantly maintaining them, and I wonder what someone who dedicates themselves to preserving these objects deserves in return.
Caring for belongings is often mistaken as superficial, but it can also be seen as gratitude for its wonder and love for the people who share them with us.
Maybe I was taught to love this car?
Mom is the opposite. She doesn’t need to understand how things work like my dad, but she has a fifth sense for quality — in how we spend time together, how she dresses for the occasion, and treats everyone with kindness that feels effortless but is often not.
She is a nurse, carrying the deep empathy and endless patience that’s needed for her graveyard shift in the emergency room, the kind of selfless love that defines her.
Love shouldn’t be conditional on whether someone deserves it. When we give it unconditionally to those who’ve never received or experienced it, we give them the opportunity to learn how to love others just as well.
My parents showed me that caring for objects and people requires both the spirit and the skill. Where did my parents learn to care about things the way they do? Do they pass down like surnames, inherited and carried forward without choice? These values must come from somewhere.
Maybe genetics is why I love this car?
Mom had once told me about a Dieter, my German great-great-grandfather, a train engineer, that we know very little about. Would it make sense that Germans would be building infrastructure in a Spanish colony transitioning to American rule? Perhaps Dieter worked at the Manila Railroad Company which connected Cabanatuan City where my mom grew up?
With a quick Claude prompt to do an extended search of the internet, it did not find any stories of Germans building railroads or trains in the Philippines. But it did find other stories.
There were maybe ~200 Germans in the entire Philippines. It found references to German geologists evaluating mines and German scientists studying flora. It found pharmacists like the Zóbel de Ayala family originating from Hamburg who arrived in 1825 and opened Botica Zóbel — the main supplier of pharmaceuticals to the Spanish colonial government. It found records that Germans were almost exclusively the only pharmacists in the country.
Or maybe the story my mom was told changed in the telling. Maybe “worked with medicine” became “worked on the railroad” somewhere between my great-grandmother and my mother.
Maybe the details matter less than the image of a German man in the Philippines building a life that would last generations. Whether he mixed pharmaceuticals or built trains — does it change what he represented?
I fell into a rabbit hole researching the origins of my grandparents’ very long surnames.
Suva. Viola. Ligon. Beltran. Santa Theresa. TeeKing. Peralta. Babala.
Eight different family lines. What did these names mean? Where did they come from? What stories were hidden in syllables assigned by colonial administrators or carried across oceans by merchants I’d never meet?
Maybe in my parent’s stories I would find the justification for repairing my Porsche?
my mom
“What must be always preserved is the spirit of the work; its life will depend on the generations that transmit this spirit and bring it to life.”
— Antoni Gaudí
“Ningning” is the nickname that our relatives called my mom, my nanay. Before she married my dad and became a United States citizen, the name on her old passport was:
SUVA VIOLA
OLIVIA BELTRAN
PHILIPPINES
Her mother, my lola, was Olimpia Ligon Beltran. Her father, my lolo, was José Suva Viola.
I always found it respectful in Spanish Filipino naming conventions to combine the surnames of their parents. Although it was a long name for the individual, it was a clear symbol that the families are now together in them.
When we landed in Madrid, I had the idea to use this trip as an opportunity to queue Claude on my phone to do some extended research on each of the surnames. I could wander the streets and eat Basque cheesecake while it sleuthed the internet from my pocket. And when I was restless from a jet lagged siesta and a late evening dinner, I would read the completed reports on my parent’s surnames as bedtime stories to put me to sleep well after midnight.
I felt a sense of thrill of uncovering something I didn’t know existed. The possibility of my family tree stretching further than the story I originally imagined. I’ve always gotten fragments of family stories from relatives at gatherings, and to have some “Intro to Our Heritage 101” framing like this would be helpful in loosely mapping the memories that are fading.
suva
Years ago at my cousin’s wedding, I’ve met a few of our Suva relatives from Canada. The surname Suva is rare on a global scale, but the name is most concentrated in India, where over 4,000 people carry it. Of those, 91 percent live on India’s western coast. The Philippines holds the second-largest concentration, with around 1,000 bearers.
The name’s roots are likely Sanskrit in origin, though its precise meaning remains contested. Some sources suggest a connection to the Sanskrit word for “auspicious” or “good,” while others have linked it to regional Gujarati dialect.
Gujarat was one of the most consequential trading regions in the Indian Ocean world for centuries. By the 15th century, it is estimated that 1,000 Gujarati merchants were resident in Malacca alone, the primary maritime gateway to the Philippine archipelago, with thousands more operating throughout the Bay of Bengal and Indonesian islands. Gujarati textiles were the dominant currency of exchange across Southeast Asia, traded for spices, gold, and other goods in ports stretching from Sumatra to the Moluccas. These were not short-term traders; they built communities, married locally, and stayed.
For my great-grandmother, the most likely explanation for the Suva surname in the Philippines is that a Gujarati merchant family followed these well-established trade routes east, possibly through Malacca, and eventually settled in the islands. When or how they came to marry into the family that would become Viola is buried in the memories of past relatives.
viola
The Viola surname has two distinct but overlapping origins. In Catalan, it derives from the Latin word viola, meaning “violet” the flower, and was used as both a given name and an occupational surname for someone who played the viol, a stringed instrument.
In the Philippines, Viola is documented as a family of ilustrado landowners from Bulacan — specifically from San Miguel, Bulacan, one of the most prominent provinces of the colonial era.
Mom would frequently remind me that we were related to Máximo Viola (1857–1933), the physician, propagandist, and revolutionary leader who studied medicine at the University of Santo Tomas before continuing his education in Spain. While in Berlin, he became close friends with José Rizal. When Rizal was penniless and on the verge of destroying the manuscript of Noli Me Tangere, Viola lent him 300 pesos to cover the printing costs — enabling the publication of 2,000 copies in March 1887.
Rizal dedicated the first copy to Viola with the inscription, “To my dear friend Maximo Viola, the first to read and appreciate my work.” The book would go on to ignite the Philippine Revolution, and Rizal would be executed by the Spanish in 1896. Viola returned to the Philippines, practiced medicine, participated in the revolution against Spain, and was later imprisoned briefly by American colonial authorities. He died in 1933.
For my great-grandfather, his surname had traveled far from wherever it first appeared, and arrived at one of the most consequential moments in Philippine history.
ligon
The Ligon surname is rare globally but carries a disproportionate presence in two countries: the United States, which holds the majority of bearers, and the Philippines, which accounts for approximately 19 percent of all Ligons worldwide, roughly 2,000 people.
The surname has debated origins: one theory traces it to the Old French word legun, referring to a type of fish, with early forms including DeLegun and L’Egun; another holds that it derives from the Welsh Llygon, a topographic name for someone who lived near a marsh.
Ligon is not a Spanish name and not an indigenous Filipino name. Its presence in the Philippines points almost certainly to one source: the American colonial period, which lasted from 1898 to 1946, during which American soldiers, administrators, teachers, and missionaries settled throughout the islands and had children who carried their names forward.
My great-grandmother would have been born around the turn of the century, almost exactly when the Americans arrived. Whether she was born into that name or married into it is unknown. But somewhere in this line, there could have been a European that crossed the Atlantic, then the Pacific, and landed in the Philippines.
beltran
Beltran is a surname with Old Germanic roots: beraht meaning “bright” and hraban meaning “raven.” The name entered Iberia not through Spanish colonizers but far earlier, carried by Visigoth chieftains during the tribal migrations of the 5th and 6th centuries CE. By the medieval period it had taken hold across the Spanish kingdoms of Navarre, Aragon, and Catalonia, the same northern Spanish regions that supplied many of the soldiers, priests, and administrators who would eventually sail to the Philippines.
In the Philippines, Beltran is one of the most common surnames the country has, with roughly 90,000 bearers. Beltrán, with its properly stressed second syllable, became the flat, unaccented Beltran that most Filipino families carry today — a small phonetic erasure of the Spanish era that occurred during the American colonial period.
Mom had mentioned that our great-grandmother or a relative in the Beltran family held a government role. This would have been rare in the mid-20th century Philippines. But there are notable Bletrans in Philippine public life, from journalists to labor leaders, appearing with unusual frequency on the side of the dissenting and the underrepresented.
There seems to be something in this family line that moves toward civic life, as if a name carries an obligation to the people who bear it.
my dad
“To do things right, first you need love, then technique.”
— Antoni Gaudí
“Peewee” is the nickname that our relatives called my dad, my tatay. On his passport:
BABALA
RANIEL TEEKING
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
His mother, my lola, was Victoria Clara Santa Theresa TeeKing. His father, my lolo, was Reymundo Peralta Babala.
Between learning more about the family, people watching on a park bench, and snapping photos of life here, I was excited to read about my dad’s side of the family: chinese trade routes, Spanish religious devotion, surnames assigned by colonial decree, and indigenous Tagalog words.
With all of this speculation about our family history, maybe the truth we remember, and what others remember, are our actions. That our wants and needs, those intentions, are often left for others to interpret.
teeking
The TeeKing surname is one of the most elusive surnames in our family. It does not appear in major genealogical databases, but we’re close with all of our TeeKing relatives, where apparently fewer than ten people bear it in the United States. No established etymology exists in Western surname records, which means that the structure of the name itself suggests is a Chinese Filipino origin.
Chinese surnames in the Philippines, particularly those of families who arrived before 1885, were typically transliterations of Hokkien or Fujian Chinese names, rendered into Spanish orthography. Names like Teehankee, Cuyegkeng, Gokongwei, and Yaptinchay are full Chinese names that became surnames through this process of transliteration and colonial registration.
“Tee” is a documented Hokkien variant of several Chinese surnames (most commonly 鄭 or 陳), and “King” (京 or 卿) appears as a secondary element in several Chinese compound names. The capitalization pattern, TeeKing as two fused words, is characteristic of how Hokkien names were sometimes written by Chinese Filipino families.
The surname of my great-grandfather, TeeKing, might represent Chinese ancestry entering this family line. Likely through the Sangley trading communities that had been present in Manila and throughout Luzon since the 16th century. Chinese merchants were among the earliest and most persistent non-indigenous presence in the Philippines, predating Spanish colonization and continuing through it.
santa theresa
Santa Theresa is a devotional surname, meaning it was adopted not from a place or occupation but from Catholic faith, specifically from Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), the Spanish mystic, reformer, and Doctor of the Church whose influence spread throughout the Spanish Catholic world.
The name Teresa may derive from the Greek therízō, meaning “to harvest or reap,” or from theros, meaning “summer”; it is first recorded in late antiquity in the Iberian Peninsula. It was largely confined to Spain and Portugal through the Middle Ages before Teresa of Ávila’s fame carried it across the Catholic world in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Spanish colonial surnames in the Philippines frequently honored saints — surnames like Santa Maria, Santa Ana, San Antonio, and San Diego appear throughout Filipino records, reflecting the deep integration of Catholic devotion into colonial naming practices. “Santa Theresa” as a compound surname follows this exact pattern: a family or individual who chose, or was assigned, a name that honored the saint.
The surname of my great-grandmother carries the fingerprints of the Spanish Church more clearly than perhaps any other in this family tree. It is not a geographic name, not a patronymic, not a trade. It is an act of faith or of colonial administration disguised as one.
peralta
Peralta is surname that originated as a description of where someone lived. It derives from the Latin petra alta, meaning “high rock” or “high stone,” and was the name of several villages in Aragon, Catalonia, and Navarre in Spain. The name moved from geography into family identity during the medieval period, as it was found among nobility and landowners across Navarre, Ávila, and Segovia, then spread through the Spanish colonial world into Latin America and the Philippines.
Peralta is among the most common surname in the Philippines. It is also held by around 90,000 people and arrived through the mechanisms of three centuries of Spanish rule. The variant “de Peralta” is most common in the Philippines globally, particularly concentrated in the Ilocos region, suggesting a specific provincial distribution during the colonial surname assignment. A Filipino military commander, Macario Peralta Jr. (1913–1965), is among its notable bearers, illustrating the surname’s deep integration into Philippine civic life.
I wish I could listen to stories about my great-grandmother’s family, Peralta. But it is likely that the Peraltas were native Filipinos, just like the Beltrans, Santa Theresas, and the Babalas she married. In a tree full of surnames that each mark a crossing, Peralta marks a staying.
babala
Babala is the surname that reaches most directly into the Philippine language itself. In Tagalog, babala means “warning” — a caution, a sign, an announcement of possible danger. It is a common word in everyday Filipino speech, and its use as a surname suggests an adoption from Tagalog vocabulary when indigenous Philippine language words were included alongside Spanish names in the surname catalog.
Globally, Babala is most concentrated in the Philippines, where around 600 people carry it. Of those, 45 percent are found in the Bicol region of southeastern Luzon, with additional concentrations in Central Luzon and Metro Manila. The name also appears in Central Africa, in Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, though this appears to be a separate linguistic coincidence rather than a shared origin.
The first Babala, my great-grandfather, Pedro Babala from Daet, Bicol in the late 1800s, is the last name I carry with me. The surname Babala may be young, but the word, a Tagalog word for “sign”, is the oldest in the Philippines.
What might this family be telling us to pay attention to?
family values
“My good friends are dead; I have no family and no clients, no fortune nor anything. Now I can dedicate myself entirely to the Church.”
— Antoni Gaudí
As it so often happens with family research, we’re often left with more questions than we have answers.
Although, the history of the surnamed had helped me forget my original intentions and feelings I had for repairing the Porsche. The decision to repair the car was becoming more obvious to me: by wanting to, love requires no explanation; but by needing to, love requires terms and conditions and a budget dependency.
When Jenna and I exited the metro at the Sagrada Família, we looked up at Gaudí’s unfinished cathedral rise against the sky.
The basilica has been under construction since 1882. Antoni Gaudí worked on it for 43 years, from 1883 until he died in 1926. When he died, only 15-25% was complete. He knew he wouldn’t finish it, and he designed it that way.
He designed the Sagrada Família in phases as sections that could stand alone, incomplete but beautiful, structurally sound even if nothing else got built. Each element self-supporting, waiting for the next generation to continue it.
There have been eight different chief architects since then. Each one inheriting the last architect’s plans, interpreting the designs while honoring Gaudí’s vision with technology he would never have imagined.
There were eight different surnames that I’d spent my nights in bed writing about. Each lineage of my family, I wanted to trace. I wanted to know what ideas German engineers, Gujarati merchants, Spanish revolutionaries, Chinese craftsmen, and indigenous Filipinos were lost over time.
Being inside this world wonder, it was difficult to hold back a tear from the awe of it all. In that feeling, I thought: maybe I have been thinking about belonging wrong. Maybe it’s simpler and beyond our understanding at the same time.
Maybe these family values, these ways of thinking, are not genetically inherited, nor are they taught to us. Maybe our worldly choices are manifestations of a greater energy — a soul, a god, or a will to live.
Gaudí had no biological children, but somehow the spirit of his work continues in countless ways. Not because his DNA lives on, but because he created a story so compelling that strangers a hundred years later keep building it. Gaudí surrendered his final years teaching apprentices, making sure the next generation understood what they wanted to build.
He understood old age as a time when we stop trying to finish everything ourselves. Maybe when we accept that our job is no longer about completion, then we can learn to trust others. Maybe we’re just temporary caretakers in life, passing the will forward.
I was reminded that the story we share with others matters more than the accuracy.
warning lights
“Anything other than looking out for people, of all sorts, is just hot air.”
— Antoni Gaudí
We took a flight from Barcelona to Lisbon, where we would stay for two nights before flying back to Boston.
On our last night, we attended a show at a fado house tucked in an old cellar near the docks. The musicians were staged under a single spotlight in front of an intimate audience. The music was about longing — for places left behind, for people who didn’t return, for the feeling of belonging somewhere that no longer exists in the same form.
Fado, I learned, comes from the Latin fatum. “Fate.”
We landed at Logan on a Friday afternoon. Gray skies and another blizzard approaching the northeast from the Atlantic. Notifications flooded my phone as it reconnected to the network. Among them, I received an email that the repairs for my car were finished, along with a link to pay the invoice.
I see now that money often fails to measure what we value.
A few hours after landing, my dad dropped me off at the Porsche dealership to pick up the car. I caught up with my service advisor, David, and he walked me through everything: new VVT solenoids, new timing components, new gaskets.
For months I’d been reading the warning lights as a problem to solve. As caution that loving it is bad, dangerous, or financially irrational. But I finally understood what the warning lights were actually signaling, or in other words, what I wanted my last name to mean to me:
Babala is a sign to love without reason.
-pips
Love how you tied all of these threads together Alec. What a rewarding look at your own history.