Vázquez is a surname of Galician origin, which later spread all over the Spanish-speaking world. Alternative spellings of the name include Vásquez or Vasques, and Vazquez or Vasquez in countries where Iberian languages are not commonly spoken.

Overview

To a lesser extent it also occurs in Portuguese-speaking countries (spelled Vasques), where Vasco is also used as a surname. Vasquez means "[son] of Vasco", and Vasco comes from the pre-Roman latinized name "Velascus", a name of uncertain origin and meaning, but probably Basque or Iberian. In Galician-Portuguese the pre-Roman name becomes Velascu > Veascu > Vaasco > Vasco.

In some Spanish-speaking countries, families of non-Iberian ancestry have also adopted this surname. In Colombia and Argentina, there have been instances of "Watzke" and "Watzka" families, of German-Czech descent, Hispanicizing their surnames to "Vasquez". The surname was chosen as being the one most closely resembling their former name; in Italy a similar phenomenon was noted with some "Watzke" changing to "Vasco".^{[ citation needed]}

There are also Spanish cognate surnames Velasco and Velázquez/Velazquez. ^[1]

List of people with this surname

Fictional characters

• Vasquez, a supporting character from the film Aliens
• Alexandra "Alex" Vasquez, one of the three main characters of the animated television series Totally Spies!
• Esmeralda "Ezzy" Vasquez, a character from the video game Real Heroes: Firefighter
• Jonah Vasquez, a character from the video game Dead by Daylight
• Jared Vasquez, an NYPD officer, detective and lieutenant from Manifest (TV series).

References

Surname list

This page lists people with the surname Vasquez.
If an internal link intending to refer to a specific person led you to this page, you may wish to change that link by adding the person's given name(s) to the link.