I (28M) recently started a new job here and met a guy on my team who goes by “Mateo D’Souza.” From the beginning something felt a bit off to me. I’ve grown up around a lot of South Asians, and in my experience names and accents are usually pretty easy to place. Like, where I’m from you mostly come across Muslim, Hindu, or Sikh names, so you get used to recognising the patterns.
In casual conversation he told a few of us he was “like a Latino,” which already sounded kind of vague. I figured maybe he meant mixed background or something, so I didn’t press it at first.
Later, another coworker mentioned we have a Mexican guy in a different department, and I said I could introduce them over coffee or something. That’s when he hesitated and said he only speaks “a bit of Portuguese.” That threw me off because earlier he was giving the impression he was more on the Spanish-speaking side.
So I asked him more directly where he was from. He kept dodging the question, giving non-answers, and at that point I just said it straight, that he doesn’t really come across as Latino to me and asked if he was actually Indian.
He got kind of quiet and later pulled me aside and said he’s actually from Britain but his parents are from India. He didn’t really elaborate much beyond that, just sort of shrugged it off.
I told him I understand wanting to fit in, but it felt misleading the way he was presenting it, especially when people were taking it at face value. Now things are kind of awkward between us, and another colleague told me I should’ve just left it alone because it’s “his personal thing.”
For context, this was just in the office kitchen during lunch, not in a meeting or anything formal, and I didn’t raise my voice or try to embarrass him in front of everyone.
I didn’t insult him or anything, just pointed out that things weren’t adding up. But maybe I pushed too hard. He did insist that “Mateo D’Souza” is actually his real name. But like I did not know he actually was catholic and it was a family thing and it is such an outlier thing that no one could be expected to guess that.