Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries (review)

David Brading's book on the Mexican Guadalupan tradition arrives as the Vatican continues to consider the case for canonizing Juan Diego, the Nahua man to whom, according to the devotion's apparition narrative, the Virgin Mary appeared in 1531, leaving her image imprinted on his cloak. Brading here provides a history of Guadalupan literature, with some attention to iconography. Popular and folk devotion is glimpsed only occasionally; Brading's purpose is to document the theological development of the tradition as a kind of Mexican gospel, its role in the fomenting of Mexican national identity, and the longstanding debates over its historical origins and its significance to the Mexican people and to Roman Catholicism. Hence the actors are largely elite and overwhelmingly male. Yet what people over the centuries have read into this simple Marian image and its accompanying legend is truly astonishing. Brading tells the story engagingly, if sometimes unevenly (for example, his esteem for Joaquín García Icazbalceta, the late nineteenth century's most important skeptic, contrasts with his dismissive treatment of Stafford Poole's 1995 book, the principal skeptical work of the late twentieth century).

In arranging the book as the history of Guadalupan sermons and other published literature, Brading considers historical evidence not in the order in which it was produced but as it enters the scholarly and theological debates. For example, a 1556 document that describes the shrine image as having been recently painted by an Indian is treated in connection with the late nineteenth century, when it was published and produced a wave of efforts to explain it away. The 1998 work in which Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole, and James Lockhart conclude that the Nahuatl version of the apparition narrative was written by Luis Laso de la Vega, the creole priest who published it in 1649, and did not depend on an earlier, native-authored text is treated ten pages before the book's end, although Brading has carefully tracked the motif of this alleged native text and its attribution to the Nahua scholar and governor don Antonio Valeriano through the earlier literature.

For Brading, the hero of this long and convoluted story is Miguel Sánchez, the creole priest who, in 1648, first published, and seems to have largely invented, the apparition narrative. Sánchez larded his text with daring typological identifications (the appearing Virgin as the Woman of the Apocalypse seen by John at Patmos, Juan Diego as Moses) that asserted not only a supernatural origin for the image but also its significance as indicating special divine patronage of New Spain. Succeeding authors elaborated upon these themes; however, as literary and theological fashions changed, later writers criticized or neglected Sánchez's Baroque and arcane text. They turned instead to Laso de la Vega's Nahuatl version, questing after an indigenous Ur-text that would ground the devotion more securely in the immediate post-Conquest period, in response to skeptics who doubted the historicity of the apparitions, and also support its construction as a synthesis of native and Christian culture.

Brading's hints of sympathy for Sánchez do not prepare the reader for the final chapter, where, in an attempt to reconcile the historical record with the sheer force of Guadalupan devotion, this historian suggests that Sánchez might be seen as having been divinely inspired to write the apparition narrative, such that the story, though not literally or historically true, bears theological truth. Similarly, the native artist who painted the image (who may or may not have been a known Nahua artist named Marcos de Aquino) might have been inspired by the Holy Spirit, such that something intrinsic to the image explains its ability to command such fervent devotion from so many. Hence, the artist and Sánchez replace Juan Diego and Valeriano...