Our Lady of Guadalupe

Behind the altar of the new basilica in Mexico City, a piece of cloth hangs in a sealed case about eight metres up, and three moving walkways run underneath it. Everyone keeps moving. Each person gets a few seconds directly below the image and is carried on. On the feast day the walkways run through the night. The cloth is a coarse cactus-fibre cloak a little under two metres long, painted with a young dark-skinned woman in a blue-green mantle covered in stars, her head bowed to her right, her hands together, a black sash high on her waist, the sun behind her in a fan of gold rays, a crescent moon under her feet and an angel below that holding her up. About twenty million people a year come to look at it.

The account

The story attached to the cloth is told in a Nahuatl text called the Nican Mopohua, from its opening words, “here it is recounted.” On Saturday 9 December 1531, ten years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, an indigenous man named Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin was walking past the hill of Tepeyac on his way to Mass. A woman called him from the top of the hill in his own language. She said she was the mother of the true God, and she wanted a house built for her there, so that she could hear the weeping of the people of this land.

He carried the request to the Franciscan bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, who wanted a sign. On 12 December Juan Diego found flowers growing on the frozen hilltop out of season, gathered them into his cloak, and opened it in front of the bishop. The flowers fell out and the image was on the cloth.

That text was printed in 1649, in a small Nahuatl book called Huei tlamahuiçoltica, published by Luis Laso de la Vega, chaplain at the shrine. It is often attributed to the Nahua scholar Antonio Valeriano and dated to the 1550s, though the dating is one of the things historians argue about hardest. A year earlier the priest Miguel Sánchez had printed the same story in Spanish, wrapped in a theological reading of the woman clothed with the sun from the Book of Revelation. Those two books, 1648 and 1649, are where the apparition narrative enters the record.

The hill had a name

Tepeyac sat at the end of the northern causeway into the island city, and a temple stood on it before any church did. Around 1576, in the appendix on superstitions he added to Book XI of his Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, the Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagún wrote down what he thought was happening there. He had spent forty years in the country and worked in Nahuatl with Nahua colleagues. He wrote for his own order, in a manuscript that stayed unpublished for centuries.

He begins by saying there are three or four places where people still travel great distances to sacrifice, and then names the first:

El uno déstos es que aquí en México, donde está un montecillo que se llama Tepeácac, y los españoles llámanle Tepeaquilla, y agora se llama Nuestra Señora de Guadalope. En este lugar tenían un templo dedicado a la madre de los dioses, que la llamaban Tonantzin, que quiere decir “nuestra madre”.

People came to the old festival from more than twenty leagues away, he says, men and women, boys and girls, with offerings, and they all said the same thing: Vamos a la fiesta de Tonantzin, let us go to the feast of Tonantzin. Then comes his complaint. Now that the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been built there, they call her Tonantzin as well, and the preachers gave them the opening by using the word from the pulpit. The proper name of the Mother of God, he insists, is not Tonantzin but Dios inantzin. And:

Parece ésta invención satánica para paliar la idolatría debaxo equivocación deste nombre Tonantzin.

It seems, he writes, a satanic invention to cover idolatry under the ambiguity of this name. Then one more observation, the one that has kept the passage in circulation for four centuries: they come now to visit this Tonantzin from very far away, as far as they came before, and the devotion is suspect, because there are churches of Our Lady everywhere and they walk past them to get here.

The same complaint continues into a second site, the shrine of Toci, “our grandmother,” near the Tlaxcala sierra, where a church of Saint Anne had been built and where, he says, the crowds still came for Toci and called Saint Anne by that name, again because the preachers had told them Christ’s grandmother was everyone’s grandmother. Guadalupe was his first example rather than his only one.

What Sahagún left is the worry of a friar in his seventies about his own converts, set down for his own order, and it concerns vocabulary and pilgrim traffic. It stops well short of saying that the woman on the cloth is an Aztec goddess, and it is too specific and too close to the ground to be waved off. He was there, he knew the language, and he wrote down what he heard people call her.

The paper before the story

The oldest hard documentation of the shrine is a quarrel between two churchmen. In September 1556 the Franciscan Fray Francisco de Bustamante preached in Mexico City against the growing cult at Tepeyac, and the Dominican archbishop Alonso de Montúfar, who had promoted it in a sermon days earlier, opened a formal inquiry into what Bustamante had said. The record of that inquiry, the Información de 1556, was found again in the archdiocesan archive in the nineteenth century and published in 1888.

What the witnesses describe is a chapel with an image on cloth, alms coming in, crowds, miracle claims, and a Franciscan superior furious about all of it. One of them testifies that the image had been painted by an indigenous painter called Marcos, usually identified with Marcos Cipac de Aquino. The apparition story is absent from the whole file: no Juan Diego, no flowers in December.

That gap is the whole historical problem. In 1883 Joaquín García Icazbalceta, a devout Catholic and the best documentary historian Mexico had, wrote a private letter to his own archbishop laying it out, and concluded that the apparition account could not be sustained from the sources. The letter got out and has been fought over ever since. Stafford Poole, a Vincentian priest and historian, went through the material again in 1995 and reached the same place from a different angle. Their opponents answer with the Nican Mopohua’s claimed sixteenth-century date, with indigenous annals, and with the argument that a Nahuatl oral tradition would leave no trace in Spanish church paperwork. The dispute is a hundred and forty years old and shows every sign of outliving everyone now working on it.

The banner

In September 1810, a few hours after ringing the bell at Dolores and calling his parish to rise against Spanish rule, the priest Miguel Hidalgo stopped at the sanctuary of Atotonilco and took a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe off the wall. It became the standard of the insurgency. By then the image had been carrying a political claim for a while: that God had done for this country what he had done for no other nation, a line from Psalm 147 traditionally attributed to Benedict XIV, who made her patroness of New Spain in 1754. Leo XIII granted the image a canonical coronation, performed in 1895. In 1999 John Paul II named her Patroness of the Americas, and on 31 July 2002 he canonized Juan Diego in the basilica itself, the first saint indigenous to the Americas.

She travels with the diaspora, onto murals and car windows and the banners of farm-worker marches across the United States. Guadalupe is the most visible case of an older Mexican religious world continuing under Catholic cover, and the Day of the Dead, with its own inheritance from the goddess Mictecacihuatl, is another.

Twelve December

The night before the feast, the atrium fills. Groups arrive who have been walking or running for days, some carrying framed copies of the image on their backs. Concheros dance in feathered headdresses to skin drums, on the ground where the temple stood, in front of a basilica. At midnight the crowd sings Las Mañanitas, the Mexican birthday song, to a picture. Then everyone queues for the walkway, and the cloth goes past overhead at the speed of the belt.

The European shrines run an order of magnitude smaller. Einsiedeln, the Black Madonna pilgrimage of the Alps, counts its pilgrims in the hundreds of thousands over a year; Tepeyac counts them in millions over one weekend.

Ask a pilgrim on that walkway who she is and you may well be told nuestra madre, our mother. That is the phrase Sahagún wrote down in 1576, in Nahuatl, and wanted corrected from the pulpit. The correction has not taken.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (Florentine Codex), Book XI, appendix on superstitions, ca. 1576; folios 234r-234v, Spanish column. Digital Florentine Codex, Getty Research Institute.
• Información de 1556: the proceedings ordered by Archbishop Alonso de Montúfar concerning the sermon of Fray Francisco de Bustamante, Mexico City, September 1556 (Archivo del Arzobispado de México; published 1888).
• Miguel Sánchez, Imagen de la Virgen María, Madre de Dios de Guadalupe (Mexico City, 1648).
• Luis Laso de la Vega, Huei tlamahuiçoltica (Mexico City, 1649), containing the Nahuatl Nican Mopohua.
• Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Carta acerca del origen de la imagen de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de México (letter to Archbishop Pelagio Antonio de Labastida, 1883).
• Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995).
• John Paul II, homily at the canonization Mass of Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, 31 July 2002 (Vatican archive).