The Sotto Family of the Philippines

This week on April 18 in 1877, Vicente Yap Sotto, known as the Father of Cebuano Journalism, Literature, and Language, was born in Cebu City. Aside from being a politician, he was also well-known as a playwright and journalist. From 1922 to 1925, he served as the 2nd district representative for Cebu in the House of Representatives then served in the Senate from 1946 until 1950, where he was the main sponsor of Republic Act No. 53 or the Press Freedom Law, now known as the Sotto Law, which protects journalists from being forced to name their news sources.

All the earliest ancestors of the Sotto family used the family name with the particle “de” and Sotto with a single “T”. It would be generations later when the family decided to add another “T” to the surname and stop using the “de” particle. Not much is known about the earliest Sottos, Joseph de Soto and his wife Maria de Anunciacion except that they were both from Quiapo. Sometime in the 1780s, the family of Joseph’s son, Valeriano, moved to Binondo. Although Valeriano de Soto was described as an “indio” in earlier records, according to the baptismal record of his son, Pantaleon, born in 1796, the family’s racial classification now became Mestizo Español. Not only that, but the family also dropped the “de” from their family name. It is clear, then, that the earliest Sottos were probably of mixed Chinese and Spanish ancestries, and the fact that they already had a family name as early as the 1700s and were allowed to continue using it after the 1849 Claveria surname decree indicates that they had a Spanish ancestor somewhere up in the family tree. Pantaleon Soto married Brigida Legaspi and they had five children, one of whom was Marcelino Antonio Soto who was the first in the family to migrate to Cebu. In fact, records in Cebu show that Marcelino was already in Cebu City as early as the 1860s. He married Pascuala Yap and started to use “Sotto”. While the earliest Sottos in Luzon were of some middling importance, later recollections of Vicente Sotto state that his father was a “cargador” and that his mother was a seller of “puso” or hanging rice. Clearly, then, the Sottos by the time they were in Cebu started out humbly. Only two of their children survived to adulthood: Filemon and Vicente, who would later become important men in the Philippines.

Filemon Sotto had a liaison with Remedios Duterte, a beauty queen of Cebu in the early 1900s. Because of this relationship, the Sottos became connected to the Duterte family which would later produce a Philippine president and vice president. Filemon, who would also become a senator, married Carmen Rallos, the daughter of Florentino Rallos, a former municipal president of Cebu. His younger brother Vicente would marry Maria Festin Ojeda, and it was both these marriages that gave the Sottos of today their first drop of Cebuano blood as Carmen was from Cebu City and Maria Festin Ojeda’s roots were from Dumanjug and Samboan, Cebu.

One of the children of Senator Sotto was Suga Sotto-Yuvienco, the first woman surgeon of Cebu and the only female city councilor pre-1986. One of the grandchildren of Vicente is his namesake, former Senate president and 2022 vice presidential candidate (where he lost to his relative, Inday Sara Duterte) Vicente Sotto III. One of his nephews, Vico Sotto, son of his brother, actor Vic Sotto, received national attention when he won as Mayor of Pasig in 2019 which ended the almost three decades of dominance of the Eusebio family in Pasig. Several other younger Sottos serve in various political positions in local governments.

The Sotto family has not only excelled in politics but also in journalism and show business. Their story is an interesting showcase of how a family can move around the Philippines until finally becoming well-known on a national scale.