Patrona del Bicol: The Virgin of Peñafrancia and the Making of a Region, 1850s to 1924

In promoting the Virgin of Peñafrancia, diocesan bishops of Nueva Cáceres from the 1850s onward associated it with the inchoate geography and religious community of “Cabicolan,” an integral aspect of the historical process by which the devotion transcended its peripherality. But only in the twentieth century was Bicol delineated as a region, when the devotion and the regionalization discourse were being tightly intertwined—reaching its apex in the statue’s canonical coronation in 1924. Regionalization was condensed in the hymn that extolled the Virgin of Peñafrancia as Patrona del Bicol, even in the absence of any formal declaration to that effect.