Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797 by Stafford Poole, C.M. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS153 would have provided a more secure vantage point from which to assess the membership and motives of the early Victorian crusades. Michael Gauvreau McMaster University Latin American Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797. By Stafford Poole, CM. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. 1995. Pp. xvi, 325. $40.00 clothbound; $1995 paperback.) With the pubUcation of this impressive work, Poole joins the ranks of those historians, like Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta, who do not subscribe to the historicity of the 1531 apparitions of Guadalupe. He writes: "the overwhelming difficulty with the account of the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe is, and always has been, the lack of documentary evidence or unequivocal references between 1531 and l648."The author admits, however, that there is some inconclusive evidence that an oral tradition existed perhaps as early as the l600's and that from 1556 on there are many references to a chapel at Tepeyac (Guadalupe) but not to any apparitions. The first written account describing the 1531 event did not appear until 1648, pubUshed by the Oratorian Miguel Sánchez,who gave his work a bizarre twist by hailing the apparitions,which, according to tradition, had been made to an Indian boy,Juan Diego, as a symbol of Mexican Creole status, thus making the Creoles a chosen people, and thereby negating the inferior status given them by the Spaniards. In 1649,the second account appeared, this one in Náhuatl, entitled Nican mopohua (meaning "here is recounted"), the work of the vicar of Guadalupe, Luis Laso de la Vega. Native Mexicans were his audience, although the Guadalupe devotion does not become prominent among them until the eighteenth century. The book comprises twelve chapters, plus an informative introduction. Chapter I: a description ofNew Spain in 1531, the year ofthe apparitions. Chapter II: a summary of the traditional story of the appearances. Chapter LII: the silence of Archbishop Zumarraga about the apparitions, as weU as that of MotoUnia,JuUan Garces, and the Franciscans of Cuauhtitlan. Chapter IV: the investigation into the matter of Archbishop Montufar and the testimonies to 1570 of annaUsts like Chimalpahin and José Bartoloche in addition to the sermon of Francisco de Bustamante. Chapter V: the testimonies ofthe EngUsh pirate, MUes PhUips, Viceroy Enriquez de Almansa, and Bernardino de Sahagún, aU ofwhom mention the Marian shrine at Tepayac but say nothing about the apparitions. Chapter VI: the testimonies of the mendicant chroniclers, among others, from 1572 to 1648. Chapter VII: the detaUed testimony ofthe aforementioned Miguel 154BOOK REVIEWS Sánchez and Luis Laso de la Vega. Chapter VIII: the ineffective efforts of the Archdiocese of Mexico to estabUsh a uniform tradition for the apparitions and the inabiUty of other writers to present documentary evidence to the same end. Chapter LX: the inabiUty of apparitionists Francisco de Florencia and Sigüenza y Góngora to Unk Antonio Valeriano with the Nican mopohua. Chapter X: consideration of two factors that played a significant role in estabUshing the "apparition tradition," as it is known today: (1) a number of powerful eighteenth-century sermons favoring the apparition story; (2) the cessation of the 1737 epidemic in Mexico attributed to the intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Chapter XI: apparitionist Lorenzo Boturini's research into the 1531 event and the confusion he introduced into the issue. Also a consideration of two challengers of the Guadalupe tradition,Juan Bautista Muñoz and Servando Teresa de Mier. Chapter XII carries the author's conclusion: "Guadalupe stiU remains the most powerful reUgious and national symbol Ui Mexico today. This symboUsm, however, does not rest on any objective historical basis." Provocative as this study is, a cautionary note must be sounded, however, because of the recent discovery in Mexico of a sixteenth-century document in Náhuatl which carries the signature of Bernardino de Sahagún and the figure of Juan Diego and of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Whether this is part of a sixteenthcentury codex relating the story of the apparitions or not remains to be seen. Until this has been estabUshed, a number of Poole's conclusions must be held tentatively. Charles E. Ronan, S.J...