The story of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico is now legendary. In December 1531, the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego three times at Tepeyac, a hill outside Mexico City. She instructed him to ask Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga to construct a temple to her there. To prove her favour, the Virgin gave Juan Diego flowers and even a beautiful image of herself painted on his cloak. In recognition of this miracle, Zumárraga and countless generations of Mexicans afterwards venerated Guadalupe with special fervour.
Stafford Poole's revised edition of Our Lady of Guadalupe dismantles this traditional narrative by meticulously analysing the veracity of the available written evidence. Such rigour, he states, corrects the tendency of writers like Virgil Elizondo who believe that faith and tradition should prevail over historical accuracy, thus opening ‘the way for extravagant interpretations … without any need to prove them’ (p. 11). His study convincingly shows that the accepted version of Guadalupe's apparition developed over time from unsubstantiated oral history, hopeful interpretation and pious fraud.
Much of the book remains the same as the 1995 edition. The additions – some recent historiography and a few new sources such as some anales (annals) (pp. 55–6) and the Códice de 1548 (p. 179) – do not change the work appreciably. As in the first edition, the study's strength in the critical analysis of these primary accounts of the apparition is most evident in two key periods.
For the sixteenth century, Poole examines anales, códices (codices) and relaciones (testimonials) cited by other studies in support of the Guadalupan story. Based on their dates, content, structure and authorship, he judges them inconclusive at best and contradictory at worst. For example, Juan Bautista, an Indian official, mentioned the apparition in his work written around 1574 but stated that it took place in 1555 (p. 52). Poole also demonstrates that the traditional account contains internal inconsistencies. While the story asserts that Juan Diego encountered Guadalupe on his way to attend mass in Tlatelolco, Poole shows that his hometown of Cuauhtitlán was a more important centre of evangelisation. The name ‘Guadalupe’ is not a natural fit for an Indian like Juan Diego; there is no ‘g’ or ‘d’ in Nahuatl. Most damningly, neither Zumárraga nor Franciscans in Cuauhtitlán mentioned the apparition. Franciscan Gerónimo de Mendieta included five chapters of visions granted to Indians in Historia Eclesiástica but did not mention Guadalupe.
By discounting much of the early history of the apparition of Guadalupe, Poole moves the origin of the traditional narrative to 1648. This was when Miguel Sánchez publicised the Guadalupan narrative for the first time and imbued it with criollismo in Imagen de la Virgen María, Madre de Dios de Guadalupe. Importantly for Poole, Sánchez stated that he could find no written records for the traditions. The inspiration for Sánchez's story came from oral tradition and from the miraculous condition of the image itself. Later writers solved this lack of documentation through an erroneous attribution of the authorship of another account entitled Nican mopohua, which was published in Nahuatl by Luis Laso de la Vega in Huei tlamahuiçoltica in 1649. Commentators like Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora of the seventeenth century and Mariano Cuevas of the twentieth believed that the Nican mopohua or a lost work that inspired it came from one of two sixteenth-century writers, Antonio Valeriano or Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl. These established a nearly contemporaneous direct line of evidence corroborating the events and attesting to an unbroken tradition. Other lost documents, like those from the eighteenth-century collection by Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci, figure prominently among the apparition's supporters. Poole cautions against relying on them by including the story of a 1995 discovery of the Códice de 1548 purporting to show the early history of the apparition. Analysis of this document showed it to be, in Poole's words, a ‘clumsy forgery’ (p. 183).
Thus, Poole demonstrates that the apparition story was a mid-colonial invention based on oral tradition, local pride and pious desire. He argues that an investigation ordered in 1575 by Viceroy Martín Enríquez de Almansa better shows the early history. It established that by 1555 or 1556, the ermita (chapel) in Tepeyac had an image of the Virgin and had gained a reputation for working miracles (pp. 78–9). The inquiry did not mention the apparition or Juan Diego. Poole considers Archbishop Alonso de Montúfar, who left a pious work to benefit the ermita at Tepeyac in 1562, a better father to the devotion than Zumárraga.
Poole dedicates less time and less critical analysis to support the other stated argument of the book, which is to show that Guadalupe inspired ‘a strong sense of group and regional identity’ among Creoles (p. 4). This was undoubtedly the case for people such as Sigüenza y Góngora and the celebrated painter Miguel Cabrera, who entitled his 1756 work on the Guadalupan image Maravilla Americana. However, criollismo does not fit Poole's evidence well, nor is he careful in studying its manifestations.
Poole identifies elements of ‘unrestrained criollismo’ in sermons dedicated to Guadalupe in the eighteenth century (p. 195). Yet, as Poole admits earlier, some of this sentiment was civic boosterism. He does not distinguish between the two, despite having sermons from Mexico City and elsewhere. Poole himself admits to some puzzlement as to why Spaniards and even the king would support a Creole-inspired Guadalupe ‘unless it was an attempt to blunt its political potential’ (p. 5), a point on which he does not elaborate. Finally, it is also unclear that this buoyant criollismo was in any way extraordinary because Poole does not examine sermons from other holy figures.
Overall, however, this revised edition continues to stand up well by assessing the historical accuracy of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe. By calling attention to half-truths and uncovering better information, it is a testament to careful scholarship and historical methodology.
