A branch of the Garrido family is better-known-as Pindan.
I ran into an older member of the family and asked her where the name comes from.
She said it comes from an ancestor (she doesn't know who) who was at a party and asked for some meat, saying, "Pendan fan guennao diddide' kåtne ya bai chagi." "Cut a little meat there and I will try it."
There is no such word pendan, either in Chamorro nor Spanish. People took it to mean the guy was asking that a piece of meat be cut for him to eat. Because the word was unheard of, people thought it was cute and used it to label the man himself, except that pendan became pindan.
The word pendan does exist in Spanish, but as a conjugation of the verb pender, which means "to hang, to be pending." Was the man asking for meat misusing the verb?
Many family nicknames are explained by family stories passed from generation to generation. Some of these stories have no basis in history. Sometimes the same family can have more than one story explaining the origin of their family nickname. So there could be other theories how this group of Garridos got the nickname Pindan.
The elderly lady who shared this story is the daughter of Jose Mendiola Garrido, the son of Juan Garrido and Dolores Mendiola. Juan and Dolores would have been young adults by the 1880s.
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