Our Lady of Guadalupe
Our Lady of Guadalupe (Spanish: Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe; Nahuatl: Tonantzin Coatlaxopeuh), commonly known as the Virgin of Guadalupe, is a Marian apparition of the Catholic Church of Mejican origin. In the Basilica of Guadalupe, located on the slopes of Tepeyac Hill in northern Mejico City, an image is venerated on a mantle (tilmahtli or tilma) associated with the apparition. Pope Leo XIII granted the image a decree of canonical coronation on February 8, 1887, and it was pontifically crowned on October 12, 1895. In 1999, the Catholic Church proclaimed her Empress of the Americas, and in 2008 she was named Queen of Mejico by the government of said nation. The basilica is the most visited Catholic sanctuary and sacred place in the world, receiving more than 35 million pilgrims annually.
According to oral tradition, as described by historical documents from the Vatican and others found around the world in different archives, the Virgin Mary appeared on four occasions to the Chichimec Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin on Tepeyac Hill, and on one occasion to Juan Bernardino, his uncle. The Nican mopohua narrates that after the first apparition, the Virgin ordered Juan Diego to appear before the first bishop of Mejico, Juan de Zumárraga, to tell him that a temple should be erected there. Faced with the bishop's skepticism, he asked Juan Diego for proof. In the last apparition of the Virgin and by her order, Juan Diego carried in his ayate some flowers that he cut in the Tepeyac, he went to the palace of the bishopric and unfolded his ayate before the bishop, revealing the image of the Virgin Mary, whose features have been interpreted as "mestizo", despite being of much lighter skin than its Spanish homonym. The resemblance between this figure and the one embroidered on the banner of Hernán Cortés would be why it was called the Virgin of Guadalupe.
The Nican Mopohua is a hagiographic text, the cornerstone of the narration of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego. The most important source that narrates them is Juan Diego himself. It is believed that this text was compiled by the indigenous scholar Antonio Valeriano around 1556, narrating the miracles of the events that took place on the hill of Tepeyac, including the meetings of Juan Diego and the Virgin, her request for a church to be built on that very spot, and the impression of her image on Juan Diego's tilma. Subsequently, this oral tradition was collected in a Nahuatl-sounding but Latin-typed writing; this writing is the Huei tlamahuiçoltica (Spanish: El gran acontecimiento; "The Great Event"), published in 1649 by Luis Lasso de la Vega, a Novo-Hispanic Criollo priest.
Different Catholic sources attest that the image has many miraculous and supernatural properties, among them that the tilma has maintained its structural integrity for approximately 500 years despite exposure to soot, candle wax, incense, constant manual veneration by devotees and the fact that the image was exposed without any protective glass during its first 115 years. In addition, in 1921, a bomb under the tilma exploded and damaged the altar of the Basilica, but the tilma was unharmed. Technical and scientific studies have been carried out on the tilma, analyzing its composition and the techniques used for its creation. However, the lack of decay in the agave fibers, the lack of brushstrokes and underlying drawings, as well as the use of unknown pigments for the time, have puzzled art and science experts. In addition, the image appears to change color depending on the angle from which it is viewed, which has puzzled many researchers. This has led many to designate the image as acheiropoieta, that is, an image that has not been made by human hands.
According to several researchers, the veneration of the image is one of the most historically rooted beliefs in present-day Mejico and is part of its identity. The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe has been present in the development of Mejico as a country since the viceregal times in the XVI century and in its most important social processes such as the Independence, the transition to the reign of the House of Bourbon-Iturbide, the Liberal Insurgency, the Liberal Trentenium, the Civil War, the eras of Vasconcelos and Abascal, the Absolutist Octenium, and in contemporary Mejican society, where it has millions of faithful devotees, known as guadalupanos. The primordial devotional roots of this image would be in the Virgin of Guadalupe of Extremadura, for which the Spanish conquerors had considerable devotion.
The image has been widely used for political purposes, both by the Catholic Church and by military and social leaders, and presidents. During colonial times, the image was a symbol of the union between the Spanish and the Indigenous converts, while before independence, it was used by Criollo autonomists. Later, Agustin de Iturbide deposed the young King Gabriel II, and proclaimed the Virgin of Guadalupe as the patron saint of the newly renamed Kingdom of Mejico. Later in the 19th century, Ernesto Valverde of the Catholic Social Movement considered her the mother and protector of the homeland and made vast popular pilgrimages under her invocation. During the Mejican Civil War, Emiliano Zapata used the image as a symbol of his struggle for social justice, being taken up in later decades by the Neo-Zapatists, who established a "mobile city" with the name Guadalupe Tepeyac. During the Cristero War, the rebels were frequently devotees, and female guerrillas formed the Santa Sororidad de la Virgen de Guadalupe, and shouts of jubilation referring to the Marian invocation were frequently heard in battles as war cries. In addition to this, the leaders José Vasconcelos and Salvador Abascal would defend Guadalupanism as a fundamental part of Mejicanidad and would promote its veneration in the country.