The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega’s Huei tlamahuiçoltica of 1649

The Story of Guadalupe is a welcome addition to a growing corpus of scholarship concerned with this most Mexican of national symbols and devotional figures, the virgen morena (dark virgin). Seen by modern Mexicans as the syncretic symbol par excellence of their mestizo society, recent scholarship (especially Taylor 1987 and Poole 1995) emphasizes the Spanish roots of this beloved Mexican devotional image (with the partial exception of Burkhart 1993). The Huei tlamahuiçoltica [Great miracle] represents one of two foundational Guadalupe texts and was published in 1649; the other, in Spanish, is by Miguel Sánchez and is referred to below. Apart from the meticulous translation of the Nahuatl text, itself an important contribution, the volume under review is notable for its analysis of philological issues. It also argues in favor of Luis Laso de la Vega, a Mexican-born Spanish ecclesiastic and vicar of the Guadalupe hermitage at Tepayacac, as the primary (though not necessarily the sole) author of the text.

The editors-translators begin their scholarly introduction by describing the text, providing a detailed comparison to the other foundational text, Miguel Sánchez’s 1648 Spanish-language work, Imagen de la Virgen María, madre de Dios de Guadalupe. Through their analysis of the vocabulary, orthography, and deployment of significant concepts (for example, altepetl) in the Huei tlamahuiçoltica, they uncover many examples of irregular Nahuatl usages. These are often best accounted for as direct translations from Spanish to Nahuatl, which inclines Sousa, Poole, and Lockhart toward the conclusion that the Nahuatl of the text represents a standard ecclesiastical Nahuatl, and thus is unlikely to be the work of a native Nahuatl speaker (though they do not completely rule out the possibility of help from one or more such individuals).

Most of the volume consists of a translation of the Huei tlamahuiçoltica’s seven sections, the most important of which are the second, the “Nican mopohua” (Here is recounted), which offers a movingly rendered account of Juan Diego’s actions and the apparitions he saw, and the fourth, the “Nican motecpana” (Here is an ordered account), which describes miracles associated with the Guadalupe image. The translation captures the beauty and charm of the Huei tlamahuiçoltica, providing the reader with the story as well as some sense of why this version became ascendant, due to “its literary or dramatic qualities, as well as to the growing feeling over time that the indigenous aspect was central and original” (3).

The text itself raises two questions central to Guadalupe scholarship. First, was the early appeal of the story primarily to the indigenous population or to the Spanish? Second, is the Virgin of Guadalupe a syncretic figure or not? While the available evidence suggests that the chapel at Tepayacac was apparently founded around the mid-1550s, the foundational documentary accounts date to the mid-seventeenth century, and their appeal was strongest at first to the American-born Spanish, or criollo population. The story has important indigenous elements, however, even as it also has the basic form of standard Iberian appartion stories. Are these elements due solely to Laso de la Vega’s desire to craft a Nahuatl-language version with appeal for indigenous audiences as intimated by the editors-translators? Or do they represent, as Burkhart (1993: 217) suggests, Nahua reworkings of the Spanish apparition tales, tales that had become associated with the image of Guadalupe at Tepayacac? And what of Guadalupe herself?

No elements in Laso de la Vega’s text (nor Sánchez’s) connect Guadalupe to the often fierce, warriorlike Nahua goddesses. Even those female deities most closely associated with human sustenance hardly match the benign, demure (though authoritative) female figure found in the seventeenth-century Guadalupe texts. Neither is the silvery-brown skin color common to her image a certain indication of her syncretic identity, because the cult image of Guadalupe’s shrine in Spain (in the province of Estremadura, from where many of the New Spain’s conquerors and early colonists came) is a small wooden image of a “black Madonna.” The origins of the virgen morena are thus more complex than Mexican popular understandings admit. These origins may well represent an intricate cultural synthesis in which the mid-seventeenth-century story sprang more from an emerging criollo worldview, yet still may have been subtly shaped by indigenous Christian lore.

While the volume under review comes at these questions obliquely through a philological approach, this superb translation and textual analysis will not likely be superceded. Of greatest interest to specialists in the study of colonial Catholicism and indigenous languages, especially Nahuatl, the student of colonial Latin American religion can also profit from a careful reading of this brief but fascinating work.