Our Lady of Guadalupe, also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe, is a title for a particular image of Mary, Mother of Jesus, as she appeared in the New World in the years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. A beloved symbol of mercy, acceptance, healing, salvation, and rebellion, her advent in the Americas dramatically altered the course of Catholicism in the New World, and her basilica in Mexico City draws around 15 million people every year. Over the centuries, her influence has extended beyond Catholic practice in the New World and into nationalism as her devotees have carried her into the social and political arenas, making her an enduring symbol of Mexican heritage and identity.

From the earliest arrivals in the New World in the late 15th century, Mary was the face of Christianity and the chosen protector of the conquistadors. In fact, the Virgin that two of the most famous conquistadors carried was also named Guadalupe, and her shrine is located in Cáceres, Spain. The sculpture, which is still the focus of her shrine, is made of cedar wood and depicts a dark-skinned woman dressed in elaborately embroidered finery, her garments covered in precious jewels and her head framed with a huge halo of gold. On her left side, her infant son sits on her lap, similarly clothed in splendor. The mother and son are so richly dressed that only the skin of their faces and hands are visible.

Today, the figure is known as Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura, and from 1340 until 1561, she was at the heart of the religious life of Spain because of her association with the Reconquista and the struggle against the Moors for control of the Iberian Peninsula. In this religiously driven war between Christians and Muslims, Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura was situated as a sort of celestial general of the armies of Christendom:

In guaranteeing victory for the Christians she inflicted death on the Moors and became in the process a sign of apocalyptic destruction. The Conquest of Mexico was understood as a continuation of the Reconquest.

(Harrington 1988, 28)

When Christopher Columbus (1451 to 1506) arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, he did so bearing this image of Mary, whose name he would give to one of the islands, still known today as Guadaloupe. A few decades after Columbus' arrival in the New World, Hernán Cortés would purportedly conquer Mexico "with an image of the Virgin of Extremadura in one hand and a cross in the other" (Zarebska, 174). Cortés and his troops carried small images and banners of Mary with them everywhere during the European colonization of the Americas, installing them in native temples and leaving them behind in each town and city they passed en route to Tenochtitlan. These images, worn on clothing, carried, or incorporated into pre-existing shrines, would set a precedent for the image of Mary as an icon to be carried by her faithful. In the story of Mexico's Lady of Guadalupe, the image that would define Catholicism in the New World would appear on the clothing of a humble man named Juan Diego.

In 1649, Luis Laso de la Vega, vicar of the Sanctuary of Guadalupe from 1647 until 1657, published a book in Nahuatl chronicling the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego. The book is called Huei tlamahuiçoltica omonexiti, in ilhuicac tlatocacihuapili Santa Maria totlaçonantzin Guadalupe in nican Huei altepenahuac Mexico itocayocan Tepeyacac, which translates to By a Great Miracle, the Heavenly Queen, Saint Mary, Our Precious mother of Guadalupe, Appeared here near the Great City of Mexico, in a Place called Tepeyacac.

Laso de la Vega's Huei tlamahuiçoltica also contains a work called the Nican Mopohua, which means "Here it is Told," which constitutes the account of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to Juan Diego. Scholars generally agree that the contents of this section came from a work by Antonio Valeriano, written in 1556 and based on the oral stories being transmitted in the years following the apparition.

Born in 1474 to the Chichimeca people of Cuauhtitlán, the man who became the honored messenger of Our Lady of Guadalupe was named Cuauhtlatoatzin, which means something like "Precious Talking Eagle" in the Nahuatl language, deriving from cuauh, meaning "eagle", tlatoa, meaning "to speak," and the honorific -tzin, which is a term that conveys a sense of reverence or preciousness. Cuauhtlatoatzin was baptized under the name Juan Diego in 1524 when he was approximately 50 years old.

According to the story, in December 1531, on his way to morning mass, Juan Diego was passing by the hill of Tepeyacac (also known as Tepeyac) when he encountered the glorious apparition of a woman. In some accounts, the female apparition spoke to Juan Diego in Nahuatl. She told him that she was Mary, the Virgin Mother of Christ, and instructed him to go to the palace of the bishop of Mexico and tell him "how much I desire that he build me a house here, that he raise my temple on the plain" (Zarebska 2002, 103)

Diego immediately went to the palace and told the bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, who did not believe him. Dejected, Diego returned to the hill and informed her of his failure, begging her to choose someone with more social standing, someone more respected than himself, so that the bishop might listen.The apparition insisted it should be Juan Diego who presented her desires, and he told her, according to the Nican Mopohua:

"I will go gladly to carry out your word, your breath: nothing will stop me, I cherish the path all the more for its obstacles. I will go carry out your word, but I may not be heard, and if I am heard, I may not be believed"

(Zarebska 2002, 106)

Diego returned to the bishop the next day, but Zumárraga still did not believe him, telling the humble man that his word was not enough, that another sign was needed to confirm his story. Diego told the apparition, and she promised him a sign for the bishop the next day.

But when Juan Diego was supposed to go to Tepeyacac and receive the sign from the apparition, his uncle fell severely ill and asked his nephew to go to Tlatelolco and find a priest to hear his last confession. Juan Diego left immediately, and though he hoped to avoid the apparition on the hill by skirting it, his attempt was unsuccessful; the apparition descended the hill, asking Diego what troubled him.

He told her of his uncle's illness, and the apparition responded by saying "Do not fear…Am I, your Mother, not here? Are you not under my shadow and my protection?...Are you not in the hollow of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms?" (Zarebska 2002, 111). Reassured by her words, Juan Diego begged to be sent with her sign to the bishop.

The apparition instructed him to go to the summit of the hill and collect some of the flowers growing there. When he arrived, he was astounded to find that the hill was covered in a variety of flowers, beautiful and in bloom despite the fact that it was mid-December. Juan Diego gathered the flowers, and the apparition placed them in the hollow of his tilma, a rough garment worn by Indigenous peoples at the time, which was similar to a cloak made of maguey plant fibers. She told him that the flowers would serve as proof of her message and that he must take them directly to the bishop.

When Diego arrived at the bishop's palace, he told him the whole story and released his cloak, letting the flowers fall. But the miracle was not only embodied by the flowers. In the hollow in which they had been held was an image of the Virgin Mary that would become one of the most famous Christian icons in the Western hemisphere. Seeing the miraculous image, the bishop realized his error and immediately ordered a shrine to the Virgin Mary to be constructed on the hill of Tepeyac.

With his sacred task completed, Juan Diego went home to find his uncle miraculously cured and speaking of The Lady of Guadalupe, who had appeared to heal him. Juan Diego dedicated the rest of his life to serving the shrine of the Lady of Guadalupe, and when he died in 1548, he was buried in her chapel.

The tilma that bore the first image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is regarded as a miracle in itself and still attracts millions of visitors to her basilica each year. Despite the rough cloth and short lifespan of the original garment, the framed tilma has survived in excellent condition, resisting decay, floodwaters, and even a bombing, over the centuries as her shrine has grown in size.

n the image, her eyes are open, head reclined, and hands clasped in prayer, signifying her humility and deference to the power of God. She wears a simple reddish tunic, decorated with flowers, with a black sash just above her belly, representing her pregnancy. Her turquoise-colored mantle is decorated with golden stars, said to symbolize the heavens and make reference to Mary's majesty within the context of Aztec hierarchies, wherein only the highest nobility could dress in such shades of blue-green. She wears a cross on a pendant around her neck, and a fiery golden glow emanates from her whole body. At her feet, an angel with colorful wings holds her aloft, and she seems to be stepping on the smaller curve of a black crescent moon.

Because of the religious significance of this image, interpretations abound, all situating Our Lady of Guadalupe as a unique bridge between Indigenous iconography of the Aztecs and the visual language of Spanish Catholicism.

In a Spanish passage of the Florentine Codex, Bernardino de Sahagún explains the significance of Tepeyacac as the location of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe. He writes"

There is a little hill called Tepeacac… now called Our Lady of Guadalupe. In this place, they had a temple dedicated to the mother of the gods, whom they called Tonantzin, which means 'our mother.' And they would perform many sacrifices there in honor of this goddess. And they would come to from more than twenty leagues away, from all the regions of Mexico; and they would bring many offerings…there are many churches of Our Lady everywhere, and they do not go to them; , they come from distant lands to this Tonantzin, just as they did in ancient times.

(Garagarza translation, 2023)

Tonantzin is a Nahuatl term that comes from to, meaning "our," nantli or nanan, meaning "mother," and -tzin (mentioned above), and thus translates to "Our Precious Mother."

Among the Aztec goddesses, there was some overlap and equivalency regarding those associated with the earth, fertility, and death, embodying the land as womb and tomb. Any Aztec goddesses could have been referred to as Tonantzin, as it seems to have been a title or epithet, rather than the name of a separate goddess. Some of these divine female figures included Cihuacoatl, Coatlicue, Xochiquetzal, and Toci. Toci (pronounced "TOH-see"), for example, meant "Our Grandmother," but she had a number of other epithets as well, including Teteo Innan ("Mother of the Gods"), Tlalli Iyollo ("Heart of the Earth"), and Temazcalteci ("Grandmother of the Sweatbaths"). She was a goddess of midwives, healing, and sweatbaths, sometimes called xochicalli ("flowerhouse"), and was thus connected to the ideas of purification, healing, and rebirth, all of which became associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe.

That the apparition of the Virgin Mary instructed that her shrine be built on the hill where Indigenous peoples had once venerated an Aztec goddess seems to suggest, as Sahagún suspected, evidence of a continued form of goddess-worship, now directed towards the Virgin Mary. These practices were empowered by Mary's validity in the eyes of the church and possibly by Mary being referred to as Tonantzin by missionaries eager to convey information about "Our Lady, Mother of God" in the Nahuatl language.

Once divided by an ocean, the Old World and the New World became inextricably linked, and few symbols represent the unification of these disparate worlds as well as Our Lady of Guadalupe. To the Spanish, she represented the Reconquista and the growing power of the Catholic God in New Spain. To the Indigenous peoples, she represented a divine guardian in the midst of unimaginable upheaval as the arrival of the Spanish ushered in centuries of instability and disturbance in the Americas.

In need of labor, the Spanish colonists forced the Indigenous populations – and enslaved Africans via the transatlantic slave trade – to become the workforce of the New World. The conditions of their lives were unimaginable; widespread illness accompanied exhaustion, malnutrition, filthy working conditions, and abuse, affecting a population already reduced by illnesses from the Old World for which they lacked immunity. In 1520, approximately 25 million people made their homes in Mexico. A century later, in 1620, there were around 1 million Indigenous peoples still alive there. The greatest and most destructive force of all came in the form of epidemics.

When, in 1736, a particular epidemic claimed the lives of at least 40,000 people in Mexico City in a single year, the blighted city turned to Our Lady of Guadalupe and found their salvation. We know this because in 1738, an episcopal priest named Cayetano de Cabrera y Quintero was commissioned by the Archbishop to write an account of the plague.

In describing the epidemic as a war by which God was exerting a vengeful power that humans had no capability of resisting, Cabrera establishes Our Lady of Guadalupe as the primary intercessor, a divine shield against God's wrath. Part of what made this association of Mary with the cessation of plague was the perception among Indigenous populations that a goddess of disease was responsible for the widespread illness and death: one who could give life and take it away. For them, the divine intervention of Mary as a holy mother but also as the figure under whose banner their way of life was destroyed would have fit their expectations of the divine feminine. After all, Aztec goddesses, including Chalchiuhtlicue, Tlaltecuhtli, Mayahuel, and Coatlicue, stood at the crossroads of life and death, and Guadalupe, being so quintessentially connected to the Indigenous peoples and their beliefs through the location of her shrine and the epithet Tonantzin, would have been an ideal candidate for such intervention.

According to Cabrera, even in the worst days of the plague, no one died in the shrine of Guadalupe, so much so that, despite its peripheral location at the time, it became a spiritual center of the city. He writes that on the very day that the municipal government officially elected the Lady of Guadalupe as patroness in May of 1737, the epidemic abated, cementing the image first seen by Juan Diego two hundred years earlier, as the Protectress of Mexico.

Despite the differing perspectives regarding Our Lady of Guadalupe among the highly stratified inhabitants of New Spain, she became a symbol of a new way of life in which her care and protection extended to both sides as a common whole. She embodied the nurturing mother, loving, kind, and forgiving. She was an intercessor through whom humans could beseech God, a natural ally of the common people, and an embodiment of unity, bridging the earth and heavens, peace and war, Christianity and Indigenous beliefs, power and powerlessness. Even while she, as the Virgin Mary, belonged to the established colonial order, she could represent all of the peoples of Mexico, and her image could be their banner of protest and rebellion, as it was when Miguel Hidalgo (1753 to 1811) led the uprising that would earn Mexico its independence in 1821 and when Cesar Chavez (1927 to 1993) fought for the rights of farm workers in the United States.

Many miracles have been attributed to Our Lady of Guadalupe since 1531, from the cessation of illnesses for whole cities to personal miracles performed for supplicants at her basilica in Mexico City. Each year, millions of people celebrate the Feast or Solemnity of Our Lady of Guadalupe on 12 December, marking the day of the miraculous appearance of her image on the tilma of Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin. Over the course of nearly 500 years, Our Lady of Guadalupe has become far more than just one of many unique images of the Virgin Mary; she is, among many other things, Jefita de los Barrios, Apocalyptic Lady, Generalísima, Patroness of the Americas, and Tonantzin.