Cordero brings Peñafrancia, poetics toHouse of Octavio Paz in Mexico City

MEXICO City --- Bikolano poet and filmmaker Kristian Sendon Cordero delivered a poetic meditation on the devotion to Our Lady of Peñafrancia and its relationship to his poetics at the former house of Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz in Mexico City on September 17.

The reading brought Bikolano literary and religious memory into conversation with one of Mexico’s most important literary spaces, creating a meeting of places, traditions, and artistic practices.

For Cordero, the Peñafrancia devotion is not simply a religious subject but a deeply embedded part of Bikol’s cultural imagination. Every year, the celebration of Our Lady of Peñafrancia transforms Naga into a site of pilgrimage, homecoming, collective memory, and the reaffirmation of regional identity.

His poetic and cinematic work has repeatedly returned to questions of place, language, memory, faith, and the ways in which local experience can be transformed and represented through literature and film. In Mexico, these concerns acquired another dimension as Cordero situated the cultural memory of Bicol alongside the literary legacy of Octavio Paz and the long historical and cultural connections between the Philippines and Mexico.

The presentation also formed part of Cordero’s wider participation in Mexican literary and cultural programs in September 2026. During his stay, he participated in the Feria del Libro of the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo, where he met scholars, writers, artists, and readers and presented his poetry from Bicol and Rinconada, now available in Spanish translation.

Cordero is a poet, fictionist, translator, essayist, and filmmaker based in the Bicol region of the Philippines. His poetry in three Philippine languages has received major literary recognition, including the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award, the Philippine National Book Awards, and the Gintong Aklat Awards. His work as a translator has included writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, and Oscar Wilde, translated into Bikol and Filipino.

His poetry collection, La Tristeza de lo Alado (The Sadness of the Winged), translated into Spanish by Lawrence Schimel, was published in Mexico by Círculo de Poesía, an independent Mexican publishing house dedicated to poetry from Mexico and around the world.

The September 17 reading was organized in cooperation with the Philippine Embassy in Mexico, Círculo de Poesía, and the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo, which hosted Cordero as part of its annual Feria del Libro.

The event offered not only a literary reading but also a cultural encounter: an attempt to place Bicolano experience, its languages, devotional traditions, and poetic imagination within a broader transpacific conversation between the Philippines and Mexico.