Alejandro Blas
Aboitiz Piñaga Advocate, Journalist & Man of Manila

Alejandro Blas Aboitiz Piñaga was born on 28 February 1892 in Manila, in the final decade of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines. His father was Cosme Damian Aboitiz Achaval — the Basque sea captain from Lekeitio who had survived the wreck of the SS Remus just three years earlier. His mother was Maria Piñaga. He came into the world in one of the great port cities of the Spanish Pacific, a city of churches and consulates and commerce, where Basque surnames rubbed shoulders with Chinese merchants and Filipino principalia families.

The family narrative holds something poignant about his earliest days: the story goes that his mother died after he was born, and that his father Cosme Damian subsequently remarried. Whether this is precisely accurate or a compression of more complicated events, it speaks to a childhood shaped by loss and adaptation — qualities Alejandro Blas would demonstrate throughout his long and remarkable life.

He grew up in the Philippine Islands during a period of extraordinary upheaval. The Spanish-American War of 1898 ended Spanish colonial rule; the Philippines passed to the United States; the Philippine-American War followed; and by the time Alejandro Blas was coming of age, he was living in an American colonial society — a world of English-language education, new institutions, and a legal system being rebuilt from the ground up. For a young man with intellectual ambitions, it was, paradoxically, a world of opportunity.

Alejandro Blas became a lawyer — and not merely a local practitioner. He argued cases before the Supreme Court of the Philippines, establishing himself as an advocate of national standing. His specialty, fittingly given his lineage, gravitated toward the maritime world: the GEDCOM notes record that he argued many cases before the Supreme Court involving Chinese-Visayan trading houses and shipping lines, a commercial-maritime specialty centred on the busy sugar port of Iloilo.

Iloilo, on the island of Panay in the Western Visayas, was in this era one of the most significant ports in the Philippine archipelago — a hub for the sugar trade, with direct links to international markets and a vibrant community of Spanish, Chinese, and Filipino merchants. For a lawyer with a Basque name and maritime instincts, it was a natural home.

Alongside his legal career, Alejandro Blas edited and published one of Manila's Spanish-language Catholic weekly magazines: Estudio. The magazine appeared every Saturday, printed at Roxas Building, 212 Calle David, esq. Escolta — Manila's commercial heart — with a telephone number (572) and a postal box (1646). It was a modest but serious publication, defending the Catholic faith against what its editor saw as anticlerical attacks, commenting on Philippine politics and society, and publishing original literary and cultural essays.

The masthead proudly announced: "Esta Revista se publica todos los sábados por Alejandro de Aboitiz" — This magazine is published every Saturday by Alejandro de Aboitiz. He was around 30 years old when he took the helm, and the magazine ran from at least 1923 through 1924 across at least four volumes. The University of the Philippines has digitised 54 surviving issues, making them freely accessible online — a remarkable window into the intellectual world your grandfather inhabited.

The note in the masthead that all content was original and exclusive — "Todos los trabajos que publica ESTUDIO son originales y exclusivos. Queda terminantemente prohibida su reproducción" — tells you something about the editor: he took seriously the intellectual ownership of what he published, and expected his contributors to do the same.

One issue of particular family significance is the 26 January 1924 edition — the issue in which the death notice of María Piñaga Viuda de Aboitiz appeared. His mother (or stepmother) had died on 29 January 1922, and two years later, in his own magazine, Alejandro Blas quietly placed her notice. It is one of the most intimate pieces of evidence we have of his inner life: a son paying tribute in the one medium entirely under his control.

On 20 January 1930, Alejandro Blas married María del Rosario García Muñoz — known as Charin — in Jerez de la Frontera, Cádiz, in the south of Spain. He was 37 years old; she was 24, born in Spain on 30 April 1905. That he travelled from the Philippines to southern Spain to be married speaks to the continuing ties the family maintained with the Iberian world, even after two generations in the Pacific.

Jerez de la Frontera is famous for its sherry bodegas and its horses — not an obvious destination for a Philippine-born Basque lawyer — but María del Rosario was from Spain, and the wedding would have brought together two worlds: the Spanish metropolitan culture and the Philippine-Basque diaspora that Alejandro Blas embodied.

Together they had at least four children, including your father Cosme Maria, who was born in Iloilo on 10 December 1943 — during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century in the islands. Alejandro Blas was 51 when his son was born.

One curious detail in your family's research notes: it appears that the aristocratic particle de — as in Alejandro de Aboitiz rather than simply Aboitiz — was adopted around your grandfather's generation. His father Cosme Damian is consistently recorded as Aboitiz Achaval without the particle; but the magazine masthead announces Alejandro de Aboitiz as director, and it is under this form that his son Cosme Maria and his grandson Alejandro (you) have carried the name.

The addition of de to a surname in Spanish tradition carries connotations of noble or notable lineage. Whether this was a deliberate assertion of status by a successful Manila lawyer, a custom that emerged in the Philippine colonial context, or simply a stylistic preference, remains an open question. What it signals is a man who thought carefully about how he presented himself to the world — which is entirely consistent with someone who edited his own magazine.