On her first day at Riverside Elementary, Xiomara waited for Mr. Patterson to call her name. When he got to her, he stopped and squinted at his list. “Zy... Zy-o-mara?” he tried. A few kids giggled. Xiomara’s cheeks grew warm, and she just nodded.

That night, she told her mother what had happened. “Everyone says it wrong,” she said. “Maybe I should just tell people to call me Mara.”

Her mother put down the dish she was drying. “Your name belongs to you,” she said. “Your great-grandmother had it, too. But people can’t learn to say it if no one shows them how.”

Xiomara thought about that. Then she took out a marker and a card. On the front, she wrote her name in big letters. Under it, she wrote: see-oh-MAH-rah. She drew a small star over MAH, so people would know which part to say the loudest.

The next morning, she taped the card to the front of her desk. Mr. Patterson stopped beside it and read it slowly. “See-oh-MAH-rah,” he said. “That’s a beautiful name. Thank you for teaching me.”

By the end of the week, even the kids who had giggled were saying it right.