In the beginning, the Virgin of Guadalupe was not well received by the institutional religion because she was considered too indigenous. Only ten years after her birth, the Catholic clergy tried to suppress the cult
by México Desconocido
The history of religious phenomena is certainly very complex. Periods such as the conquest and evangelization in Mexico in the 16th century are a faithful testimony to all this. And it is that, although it may seem extraordinary to us, at that time the Catholic clergy tried to eliminate the Virgin of Guadalupe, only ten years after her appearances on the Tepeyac hill. With this in mind, can we say that the Guadalupana was really a symbol of religious imposition? Let’s learn more about it.
Evangelization. Veneration by substitution
After the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the Franciscans were the first religious order to arrive in New Spain. With their early arrival in May 1524, they were in charge of beginning the evangelization of the Mesoamerican peoples. After the destruction of the effigies and temples of the ancient gods (such as in Texcoco in 1525), the flogging and imprisonment of people reluctant to be baptized, Friar Pedro de Gante decided to introduce pre-Hispanic practices into the Catholic cult. With this, they managed to begin to attract the indigenous people to Christianity, and begin their indoctrination.
Also for this purpose, they promoted what the historian Edmundo O’Gorman called “substitution cults.” That is, the religious replaced the ancient deities with Marian advocations or saints, in order to direct indigenous devotion towards them. It is in this context that, according to what is related in the Nican Mopohua, the miraculous apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe began in December of the year 1531.
Although there is no evidence of these portents, there is evidence of the early Marian cult in Tepeyac. Chroniclers such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo or Friar Bernardino de Sahagún left notice of it in their writings.
Idolatry and Franciscan fury. The Catholic clergy tried to suppress the Virgin of Guadalupe
However, by the year 1540, the evangelizers were fighting what they had previously promoted. The native peoples had developed a cult centered on images, particularly those of Mary. The intricate religious syncretism that the Mesoamericans had practiced with Christianity and their ancient faith, revealed a devotion different from what the friars knew in Europe. The Franciscans, who were and continue to be Christocentric, saw this as an uncontrolled and massive idolatry. In places like Tlaxcala, they destroyed all the effigies of saints and virgins.
The main point of this type of heterodox cult was the hill of Tepeyac, where the veneration for the Virgin of Guadalupe had become strong. This fact had as a background the fervor in that place for the ancient goddess Cihuacóatl. Sahagún himself never looked favorably on the new Virgin. In his famous Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, he left evidence that it was known that in ancient times, Tonantzin Cihuacóatl was venerated in that place. The censorship exercised by these religious people was openly hostile to the Guadalupana, turning her devotion into an informal matter without full ecclesiastical recognition.
Archbishop Montúfar against the Franciscans. The triumph of the Guadalupana
Later, in 1554, the new archbishop of Mexico arrived: the Dominican Alonso de Montúfar. He decided to centralize the power of the archbishopric. To do this, in 1556, he wanted to subordinate the Franciscan autonomy and begin collecting tithes from the indigenous people. In addition, having learned of the stories of the apparitions at Tepeyac, he began to promote the formal worship of this Marian devotion. Faced with this, the Franciscans accused him of instigating idolatry towards a painted image, of which there was no evidence of its miracles.
It is in the midst of all this that historians such as Edmundo O’Gorman or Rodrigo Martínez Baracs have proposed that thanks to the advice of the humanist Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, the archbishop summoned Antonio Valeriano and other scholars from the College of Santa Cruz Tlatelolco, to collect testimonies about the apparitions of the Virgin of Tepeyac. The purpose was to give it legitimacy and diffusion through what would become the Nican Mopohua. It is not a question of one Juan Diego, but of several “Juan Diegos”, anonymous informants, who told Valeriano what they had seen. Their stories seem to be reminiscent of the appearances of the Mexica deity Cihuacóatl in pre-Hispanic times. Thanks to all this, a formal cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe was established around 1556, officially recognized by the Catholic Church.
The Virgin of Guadalupe: the triumph of the conquered
Thus, the various historical investigations and hypotheses point to the fact that, contrary to what some believe, the Virgin of Guadalupe is rather an original religious expression of the indigenous peoples subjected to Spanish power. These communities, encouraged by the violence and oppression committed against them in this period, built a figure of legitimacy in the new political, social and religious order imposed by the Europeans.
Even her iconographic attributes seem to be an amalgam of features of ancient Mexican deities together with those of the Immaculate Conception. Although the name Guadalupe comes from the homonymous Virgin of Extremadura, in Castile, Spain, it was not taken directly from her, but from the mountain range where Tepeyac is located. As Dr. Miguel León-Portilla pointed out, it seems that the mountain range to which the famous hill belongs was called “de Guadalupe” (as it is still known) by the conquerors, some time before the apparitions. This is because most of them came from the Castilian region; to commemorate their place of origin, they named the Mexican mountain range after their patron saint. The name “Sierra de Guadalupe” was already included in the first minutes of the Mexico City council.
As the Mexican philosopher Luis Villoro commented in the documentary El pueblo que caminando (1995), the conquered managed to resist and conquer their conquerors through the Virgin of Guadalupe. To protect them and overcome Spanish domination, to legitimize the right they had to exist in the nascent New Spain, the Guadalupana successfully broke into the hegemony of Catholic Christianity. As a social, historical and anthropological phenomenon, the Virgin became a continuous symbol of resistance and social justice.
