I was struck Monday evening in church, as I will be again later today, when the names were read. I was seated with Anna, my niece, in a pew up front at St. Joseph’s, the parish I grew up in. We were awaiting practice for Confirmation, the ritual taking place this evening that signifies religious adulthood in the Catholic Church. The sound and rhythm of the names was a bit different than it was back when I was a youngster marking the same rite of religious passage in the old church next door that now serves as the parish hall.

Then the names were Jim and John, Paul and Jill. The last names were Spehar and Guadnola and Abell and Young. There was only a smattering of Hispanic names, Venegas and Ulibarri a couple that I remember still. This week my niece and I will be in the minority, sharing pews with Jaime and Juan, Pablo and Rosalea. We’ll be hearing last names that mark a significant change in the makeup my old parish and of our society.

It’s not the first time I’ve been a minority. It took me a few weeks to realize just what was different about new classmates and friends at Arizona State University back in the mid-1960s. The decision the day before heading south to follow my future bride to Tempe meant I arrived with nowhere to live, no friends expecting me.

A short stint in a $15/week motel snared me a roommate and lifelong friend. He’d arrived after a similar decision, forsaking snaps as a quarterback at New Mexico State to follow his own future wife to ASU.

Both Jay and Linda were from the mining town of Miami, Ariz. Many of their friends were Hispanic. Some were Native American. Those friends became my friends and, at times, roommates. Names like Munoz and Garcia and Tewksbury and the darker faces behind them were in the majority at weekend parties and in some classes.

That didn’t bother me, even during a time when mostly Hispanic farm workers and campus groups such as Chicanos por la Causa became increasingly active socially and politically. We applauded when legal challenges forced Arizona school districts to quite shuffling Hispanic elementary school students struggling with English into special education classrooms merely because of language problems.

But the changing racial makeup of the United States now bothers some of us. And that’s nothing new.

“Bohunk” was the derisive name applied to my Slavic ancestors when they immigrated to Crested Butte to mine coal in the 1880s. Even in that small Gunnison County community, among those doing the hard dirty work better off Americans of their time didn’t want to do, lines were drawn between my family of Croatians and Slovenians and their neighbors, the Italians and Hispanics and other races who also worked the shafts and tunnels.

Decades later, watching another niece compete in a track meet at her Los Angeles area high school, it was evident that all the various minorities — Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and more — clearly comprised the majority of spectators. Working with Colorado’s resort communities a decade ago, I learned there were 28 different languages heard in classrooms of one mountain school district, that accents were as likely to be West African as Hispanic or Eastern European instead of Australian. In state employment officers, it wasn’t unusual for counselors and clients to converse via telephone through a translator in another community.

These days, in addition to your servers and groundskeepers, it’s your doctors, professors and other professionals who might sound different. The companion your kid plays with at preschool or takes to the high school prom may not look much like them.

Along our coasts and in the southwest, those who advocate building walls and militarizing borders will soon be in the minority if they aren’t already. Strutting vigilantes and 12-foot walls are temporary fingers in failing dikes. They’ll beget higher ladders, deeper tunnels and alternate routes to a better life.

This evening, I’ll be happy to be in the minority … pleased to accompany Anna in her rite of religious passage. Part of the ritual involves choosing the name of a Saint as your confirmation name. My selection decades ago was Francis. Tonight, Anna’s choice is Guadalupe.

Together, in addition to the religious significance of the ceremony, I also believe we’ll both be honoring the efforts of those who’ll be seated around us, those folks with the different names who are following the same path to opportunity that brought my own oddly named and funny sounding ancestors here to make their earlier positive impact on our country.

Jim Spehar will be the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned and different-looking guy in the second or third row this evening at St. Joe’s. He welcomes your thoughts at jimspehar@bresnan.net.