CREOLE NATIONALISM 149
truth to its splendor, truth obscured by an incred-
ible multitude of writers on America.” The epic,
heroic character that Clavigero gave to the his-
tory of ancient Mexico refl ected the creole search
for origins, for a classical antiquity other than the
European, to which the peninsulars could lay bet-
ter claim. The annals of the Toltecs and the Aztecs,
he insisted, offered as many examples of valor,
patriotism, wisdom, and virtue as the histories of
Greece and Rome. Mexican antiquity displayed
such models of just and benevolent rule as the wise
Chichimec king Xolotl and philosopher-kings such
as Nezahualcoyotl and Nezahualpilli. In this way,
Clavigero provided the nascent Mexican national-
ity with a suitably dignifi ed and heroic past. The
Chilean Jesuit Juan Ignacio Molina developed simi-
lar themes in his History of Chile (1782).
The creole effort to develop a collective self-
consciousness also found expression in religious
thought and symbolism. In his Quetzalcoatl and
Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Con-
sciousness (1976), Jacques Lafaye showed how
creole intellectuals exploited two powerful myths
in the attempt to achieve Mexican spiritual auton-
omy and even superiority vis-à-vis Spain. One was
the myth that the Virgin Mary appeared in 1531
on the hill of Tepeyac, near Mexico City, to an in-
dígena from Cuauhtitlan named Juan Diego and
through him commanded the bishop of Mexico to
build a church there. The proof demanded by the
bishop came in the form of winter roses from Te-
peyac, enfolded in Juan Diego’s cloak, which was
miraculously painted with the image of the Vir-
gin. From the seventeenth century, the indita, the
brown-faced Virgin (as opposed to the Virgin of Los
Remedios, who had allegedly aided Cortés) was
venerated throughout Mexico as the Virgin of Gua-
dalupe. Under her banner, in fact, Miguel Hidalgo
in 1810 was to lead the indigenous and mestizo
masses in a great revolt against Spanish rule.
The other great myth was that of Quetzalcóatl,
the Toltec redeemer-king and god. Successive co-
lonial writers had suggested that Quetzalcóatl was
none other than the Christian apostle St. Thomas.
On December 12, 1794, the creole Dominican Ser-
vando Teresa de Mier arose in his pulpit in the town
of Guadalupe to proclaim that Quetzalcóatl was
in fact St. Thomas, who long centuries before had
come with four disciples to preach the Gospel in the
New World. In this the apostle had succeeded, and at
the time of the Conquest, Christianity—somewhat
altered, to be sure—had reigned in Mexico. If Mier
was right, America owed nothing to Spain, not even
Christianity. Spanish offi cials, quickly recognizingThe myth of the Virgin of Guadalupe, appropriated
by creole nationalists to advance their nineteenth-
century struggle for independence and cultural
hegemony, later served lower-class indigenous
and mestizo peasants in their fi ght for social
justice. [The Granger Collection, New York]