Pérez

The name behind the surname is Pedro, and behind Pedro is the Latin Petrus, the rock, the word Christ made into a man's name when he renamed the apostle. Medieval Castile also used the shorter form Pero, and it is that older shape, not the modern Pedro, that the surname preserves. Pérez is the son of Pero, fossilised in a spelling nobody has said aloud for centuries.

The same father produced Peres and Pires in Portuguese and Galician, Peris in Catalan, Pérez in Castilian, and outside Iberia the parallel names built on Peter run through Peters in German, Petrović in Serbo-Croatian, Petrescu in Romanian and Peterson in English and the Scandinavian tongues.

The stress falls on the first syllable, and the middle consonant divides the Spanish-speaking world: Castile says it with a lisped th, Hispanic America with an s. English speakers reliably push the stress onto the last syllable instead, which is why the name a diaspora family answers to in Ohio or Sydney does not sound like the name their ancestors carried out of Spain.

The surname worked too well. Because a patronymic can be minted wherever a father is christened Pedro, and because Pedro was among the most-given names of Christian Iberia, the record filled with men called Pérez who had nothing whatever to do with one another. The remedy that became general practice was to hang a place on the end: the town a man came from, or the stronghold he had helped take.

That is how the compound names were built, and they are still carried. The Pérez de Tudela, the Pérez de Villamayor, the Pérez de Soria, the Pérez de la Calzada, the Pérez de Zamora: each of them a Pérez family that needed a second word to be findable at all. The addition is not a claim of nobility. It is an administrative fix for a surname that had outgrown its own usefulness.

A reader who goes looking for the Pérez coat of arms finds more than sixty of them, sorted by region and by family, because there is no single house at the root of the name to own one. Among them is a shield parted in two: on the first half a green pear tree in fruit of gold on a silver field, within a blue border charged with three silver fleurs-de-lis; on the second a crowned lion rampant in purple on gold.

The honest statement about the surname is the one the Spanish record makes bluntly. Countless families and lineages of entirely different origin and provenance have carried it, with no relationship between most of them, no genealogical link and not the faintest primitive community of blood. A Pérez in Huelva and a Pérez in Palencia are not distant cousins. They are two families whose ancestors happened to have fathers with the same Christian name.

One Pérez family is documented rather than assumed, and it sat in the Cantabrian coastal town of Colindres, in the judicial district of Laredo. At the end of the sixteenth century it produced Pedro Pérez de la Quintana, a native of Colindres who rose to general of Philip II's Royal Armada and was made a knight of the Order of Calatrava.

The later record of the same house is a record of proof rather than of battles. Felipe Antonio Pérez Díez, also born at Colindres, obtained a provision of hidalguía from the Real Chancillería de Valladolid on 13 January 1763. His son Martín Nicolás Pérez Guarino won a carta ejecutoria de hidalguía from the same court on 26 July 1826, then left the north altogether and settled at Talavera de la Reina.

Pérez of this family spread across their own province and stayed there: at Peñacastillo in the district of Santander, in the Valle de Villaescusa, at Bárcena and Tezanos in the district of Villacarriedo, at Silió in the municipality of Molledo, and in Arenas de Iguña, Caranceja, Muriedas, Ruiloba and San Pedro del Romeral. That is one surname filling a single Cantabrian map.

A branch of the Colindres house did not stay. José Pérez García was born there in 1726 and went out to America, where he became a lieutenant colonel in the army and Prior of the tribunal of the Consulado of Chile, the merchant court that governed the colony's trade. He also sat down and wrote a history of the kingdom of Chile, which makes him one of the very few men of the name to leave a book behind rather than a lawsuit.

The line he founded stayed in the country he had written about. A descendant of that branch, José Pérez Mascayano, was born in Santiago de Chile in 1800 and rose to be president of the republic.

Pérez reached the Americas with the first ships and never stopped arriving. Mexico took the largest share: the men of the name who came over with Hernán Cortés settled, married and founded families there, and their descendants turn up in the colonial record as soldiers, clergy, royal treasurers and familiars of the Holy Office. Listing everyone of the name who took part in the settlement that followed would produce, by one account, a nearly interminable list.

The earliest of them are known by name, and they carry their home towns exactly as the compound surnames do. Alonso Pérez de Zamora in 1519. Alonso Pérez de Trigueros, of Huelva, in 1520. Antón Pérez de Móstoles, out of Madrid, in 1526, and Bartolomé Pérez de Alange, from Extremadura, in 1527. Andrés Pérez of Seville in 1539. Antón Pérez, born at Conil in Cádiz, and Morán Pérez of Córdoba. Half a dozen towns of southern and central Spain, emptying into a new hemisphere one man at a time.

The clearest measure of how thickly the name lies is that a single forename attached to it needs a whole page to sort out. Antonio Pérez del Hierro (1540-1611) was secretary to Philip II of Spain. Antonio Pérez of the Society of Jesus (1599-1649) was a theologian and jurist. Antonio Pérez de la Mata (1842-1900) was a philosopher.

The modern ones are as crowded. Antonio Pérez Guerrero, known as El Sevillano (1909-1989), was a flamenco cantaor, and Antonio Pérez Olea (1923-2005) a composer. Antonio Pérez Ariño was a trade unionist, a member of the UGT during the civil war. Antonio Pérez Pérez (1934-2024) was an editor, collector and artist, and another Antonio Pérez Pérez, born in 1954, a film producer. Eight Spaniards, one name between them, and no reason to think any two were kin.

Pérez is the eighth most common surname in Spain and is spread evenly enough that no region can claim it. The national statistics office counted, on 1 January 2021, some 776,532 people carrying it as their first surname, 789,741 carrying it as their second, and 25,567 carrying it twice over. Its heaviest provinces are Orense at 3.28 per cent of the population, Huelva at 2.52, Zamora at 2.47, Palencia at 2.36 and Pontevedra at 2.32: Galicia, the Castilian meseta and the Andalusian coast all at once.

Abroad it did what Castile did. It is the fifteenth most popular surname in the Philippines and the third most common in Venezuela. Brazil shows the split between the two Iberian spellings plainly: the Portuguese form Peres has 145,619 bearers and stands 214th, while the Spanish Pérez has 52,184 and stands 429th, arriving there chiefly with immigrants from Spain and from Spanish America.