CHAPTER 5 THE COLONIAL PERIOD IN MESOAMERICA 197Box 5.1 The Virgin of GuadalupeThe popular story associated with this cult asserts that it began in 1531 when the Virgin appeared
several times to a Nahua commoner named Juan Diego. Intercepting him as he walked past the
hill of Tepeyacac, on the lakeshore north of Mexico City, she spoke to him in Nahuatl and told
him to go to the bishop, who at the time was the Franciscan friar Juan de Zumárraga, and to ask
that a shrine be built for her on that site. The bishop did not believe Juan Diego and insisted that
he bring some sign from the Virgin. She then had Juan Diego gather into his mantle the flowers
that were blooming on the hillside. When he shook out his mantle in front of the bishop, the Vir-
gin’s image appeared miraculously impressed upon the cloth. Zumárraga kneeled before it, and
soon a new shrine was built to house the image. According to tradition, this cloth image is the
same one revered today at the basilica at Tepeyacac, which now lies in the northern part of Mex-
ico City’s huge urban sprawl.
Controversy has long surrounded the origins of this cult, for authentic sixteenth-century
documents supporting the Juan Diego story have never been found. The date of the shrine’s
origin is unclear, though it was surely founded by Spanish devotees of the original Virgin of
Guadalupe, Spain’s principal shrine to the Virgin Mary. The cult image at the Spanish shrine is a
statue of the Madonna and Child. The first cult image in Mexico may have been a copy of this
statue, later superseded by the cloth image known today. In contrast to Spain’s Guadalupe, this
image depicts the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception: She stands alone, hands joined as if in
prayer, upon a crescent moon and surrounded by beams of light.
The Mexican shrine first became popular in the mid-1550s, when significant numbers of
Spaniards from the city started going there to worship. One document states that the cult image
that these Spaniards were revering had recently been painted by a native artist. Stylistically, the
cult image does closely resemble the work of native artists from the mid- to late sixteenth cen-
tury, much of which was based on woodcuts imported from Spain. These artists sometimes
painted religious images on cloth. By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, people
were claiming that the image had miraculously cured various illnesses and injuries.
Another popular claim, that the shrine stood on the site where an Aztec mother goddess
named “Tonantzin” had previously been worshipped, such that the identity of this goddess
merged with that of the Virgin, is also impossible to substantiate. Tonantzin is not the name of
any goddess but rather an honorific title (“our dear mother”) that Christianized Nahuas used for
the Virgin Mary. It is possible, though, that some preconquest shrine did stand on this site. It was
by no means unusual for colonial chapels and churches to be built on or near the ruins of pre-
conquest temples.
The Juan Diego story was first published in Spanish in 1648 and in Nahuatl the following year.
Both editions were the work of creole priests; the author of the Nahuatl version, Luis Laso de la
Vega, may have had some assistance from a native speaker of the language. The basic outline
of the story bears a strong resemblance to European legends about miraculous images. Appar-
ently, this basic legend form was adapted to fit the Mexican context and an image that already
existed, and to which people were attributing various miracles.
Despite the popular belief that the shrine immediately became a focus of native religious
devotion, it appears from historical records that Indian participation in the cult was limited until
priests began, in the later seventeenth century, to propagate the cult in native communities. Until
this time, as James Lockhart has noted, Indians would have had little interest in a saint’s cult
whose focus lay outside their own communities and whose shrine was not under native jurisdic-
tion. Native people participated avidly in devotion to the Virgin, but they preferred their own
local images housed in their own churches and tended by their own confraternities.
However, by the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the old community boundaries
were weakening; many Indians spoke Spanish as well as their native language; and many were
spending long periods outside their own communities, working as wage laborers. Away from
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