Double lastnames and crossed-bloods in Peru

I was recently chatting with one of my employees about a conversation she had had with one of our potential clients, and she mentioned that one of her uncles had a last name exactly the opposite of hers. I don't want to give real names so I'll just take whichever as an example. Let's say her last name is Garcia Sanchez, well her uncle is a Sanchez Garcia.

Now the rule in general for Spanish-speaking countries is that they use both the first last name of their father *and* their mother to form their last name, meaning her father was a Garcia something and her mother was a Sanchez something, and that her children will be something Garcia...

Well, it comes out that her uncle doesn't have the same last names just by a very surprising turn of events. No, in fact they all come from a very small village community in the Andes, where only a few families co-inhabited, so mixing the families was kind of... regular (although she insisted that they were only marrying remote family members). For example, she added, her mother and her father knew each other since they were babies and, although not sharing the same last names, they were kind of family since the beginning...

I was surprised and half shocked at first, and then, I came to think that, although it is taught to us in every step of our education that marrying family members (and having children with them) is either prohibited or a bad idea genetically (depending on who teaches it), we must have come from the same kind of background as well. Obviously, a small village doesn't have much genetical diversity to play with.


The government in Peru is frequently trying to bring new technologies and "lifestyle improvements" to people still living in the Andes, but as I discussed recently with the mother of a friend staying at our place, some people don't really care, and although they don't have a phone, a TV or a car, they are just crazily happy. But how do you measure happiness from people who can't read or write and don't know about the world around them? It's their right to stay like that. One day or another, if they want to, they'll just get out of there and connect with the rest of the world, but the decision should be up to them, not us.