According to Melanie Maldonado, Petronila Guilbe (originally Guilbee with two Es) was one of a few women that have a “near mythological presence” in bomba oral and sung history. She was likely from Ponce, and was a “dancer who frequented the batey of Domingo ‘Dominguito’ Negrón Matías (1877–1955) in Cataño (Fernández Morales 1999, 180), and is memorialized in a bomba song composed as a yubá that calls on her name: “Petronila Guilbe, yo no declaré.” ¹ In Spanish and US colonial records from Puerto Rico, there is a Petronila Guilbe who was born in the late 1860s and was enslaved by two men: the British immigrant-investor, Jaime Guilbee (with two Es) who owned Hacienda Fortuna, and his associate, a money-lender and investor named Francisco Marich. Together, these men owned over a hundred slaves, most of whom, including Petronila and her mother Fabiana Guilbe, were noted in the 1872 registro de esclavos as living in Barrio Capitanejo. ² In 1888, she later reappears as the mother and sole registered parent of a child named Josefa Guilbe, who according to the birth record, lived not far from Capitanejo in Barrio Bucaná, and worked as a “lavandera.” ³. Petronila also later appears as the spouse of Simplicio Mangual, who like Petronila, was noted by the paid census-taker as a Black man. ⁴. His death record from 1932 says he was a manual laborer at a local sugar plantation. In 1930,  the Census lists Petronila as still living in Bucaná with her husband, her daughter, her son-in-law, and her grandchildren. In 1950, she died of endocharditis (infection of the heart) while living in Barrio Bélgica in Ponce.

Was this the Petronila Guilbe named in the song made famous by Rafael Cepeda who regularly sang it? Did this Petronila from Ponce ever live in Cataño? ⁵. If not, how was she known in the Cataño-San Juan-Cangrejos region?  Like many bomberxs, is it possible that she travelled to bailes de bomba in the northeast and was known among people there that way? Or it is possible that she relocated to San Juan or its vicinity after her husband died in 1932? Or was the song originally sang in Ponce, in the bailes de bomba in Bucaná, and was later brought to the northeast by someone else? ⁶.