Eric Velasquez: Hello, my name is Eric Velasquez. Both my parents come from Puerto Rico. Both of them are of Carib and African ancestry. Velasquez is the name of a very famous Spanish painter named Diego Velázquez. He painted in the 1600s. However, no one in the family is really sure how we ended up with the name. We know that there was also a man named Velázquez on Christopher Columbus' ships who settled in Puerto Rico and eventually owned a lot of land there. We have a lot of family stories, but none of them connect us to the name.