Tenochtitlan, Guadalupe and Nahua Communities Today

The Mexica reached the valley of Mexico late, served others as mercenaries, and founded Tenochtitlan on an island in the lake in the fourteenth century. Within a hundred years the alliance they led dominated central Mexico and drew tribute from hundreds of towns, and their capital was among the largest cities in the world when Cortes reached it in 1519. It fell in 1521 after a siege, an epidemic, and the defection of subject peoples who had reason to prefer almost any other arrangement.

What followed was not a simple replacement. The Franciscans who arrived in 1524 learned Nahuatl and produced grammars and dictionaries, and in Bernardino de Sahagun's workshop an enormous encyclopedia of Nahua life was compiled with Nahua assistants. Nahuatl became a written language of the colony, used in wills, land suits and municipal records.

The apparition of the Virgin at Tepeyac, where a shrine had stood before, produced the most important devotion in the Americas. Stafford Poole's study traces the documentary history of the Guadalupe account and finds the earliest sources considerably later and thinner than the devotion assumes, a conclusion disputed within the church. Around two million people speak Nahuatl today, and their communities maintain observances that are neither the old religion intact nor only Catholic.