A birth certificate is a person’s first official document. But in California, a 30-year-old rule prohibits the use of diacritical marks -- like tildes and accents -- on birth certificates.
Parents Nancy Chaires Espinoza and Pablo Espinoza found out about the rule firsthand when trying to name their now 9-month-old son.
"His full name is Nicolás Agustín Espinoza Chaires," Nancy says.
Nancy, a lobbyist in Sacramento, says she and Pablo, who works in the Assembly speaker's office, named Nicolás after two saints. But when they tried to get his birth certificate, they were told they couldn't use the proper pronunciation marks.
"It was pretty upsetting to us when we found out that we couldn't give him the names that we had selected for him," Nancy says.