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Juan Diego

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The Nahua man to whom, in the Guadalupe account, a young woman appeared at Tepeyac in 1531 speaking Nahuatl, and on whose cloak her image is said to have been left. He was canonised in 2002 as the first indigenous saint of the Americas. Whether he was a historical person is genuinely disputed and has been argued in print by both sides: no document of the sixteenth century names him, and the accounts that do were published in 1648 and 1649.

Facts
Disputed
Historicity
Historicity debated 1
Stafford Poole's Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531 to 1797 (University of Arizona Press, 1995) examines the documentary record for the Juan Diego apparition tradition. Poole's historical method traces the tradition's appearance in print, and finds it cannot be traced behind the printed accounts of 1648 and 1649, over a century after the claimed 1531 events, and that Juan de Zumarraga, the bishop who appears in the story, never mentions it in his own surviving writings. Defenders hold that no paper trail is to be expected for an indigenous commoner of that generation and cite earlier documents, chief among them a pictorial manuscript dated 1548 which surfaced only in 1995 and whose own authenticity is itself disputed.
Lifespan or Floruit
1474 to 1548 1
The source calls this a traditional date rather than an independently fixed one.
Lifespan or Floruit
Traditionally 1474-1548 1
Stafford Poole's Our Lady of Guadalupe (1995) records that Juan Diego's traditional birth and death dates come bundled with the wider apparition tradition and rest on the same seventeenth century printed accounts whose reliability Poole's own documentary research disputes, rather than on any independent record of his life.
Place of Origin
Stafford Poole's Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797 (University of Arizona Press, 1995) records that the Guadalupe account places Juan Diego's home at Cuauhtitlan, in the valley of Mexico, some distance from Tepeyac where the 1531 apparition is said to have occurred; Poole's study, which argues that whether Juan Diego was historical at all is genuinely disputed since no sixteenth century document names him, notes this origin place, like the rest of his biography, rests entirely on accounts published only in 1648 and 1649. 1
Attributions
Mythic Association
Central to the account of Our Lady of Guadalupe, credited with four apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Tepeyac hill in 1531, whose image is said to have been miraculously imprinted on his cloak, an object still displayed at the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City. 1
Attestation
Traditions Revering This Figure
Christianity 2
Canonization
Formally canonized 3
Sourced to the subject's own accountBeatified in 1990 and canonised on 31 July 2002 by John Paul II at the basilica at Tepeyac
Veneration
Feast DaySourced to the subject's own account
9 December in the Roman Catholic calendar, the date the traditional account assigns to the first of the four apparitions. 3
Identity
Also Known As
Cuauhtlatoatzin 1
Gender
Male 1
Scholarship
How Its Legacy Is Contested
Whether he was a historical person is genuinely disputed and has been argued in print by both sides: no sixteenth century document names him, and the earliest accounts naming him were published in 1648 and 1649, more than a century after the events they describe. 1
Position Profile
Key Text
The Guadalupan accounts published in 1648 and 1649 are the earliest surviving texts that record his story; no document of the sixteenth century names him. 2
Learn More
What the Guadalupe Account Tells

The Guadalupe account is a short and very carefully made piece of Nahuatl prose, and almost everything popularly known about Juan Diego comes from it.

The story

A man called Juan Diego, a Nahua from Cuauhtitlan, is crossing the hill of Tepeyac on his way to Mass in December 1531 when a young woman appears to him, speaking Nahuatl, and tells him to ask the bishop to build her a house on that spot. The bishop, Juan de Zumarraga, does not believe him. She sends him back. The bishop asks for a sign.

At the last encounter she tells him to gather flowers from the hilltop, out of season and out of place, and to carry them to the bishop in his cloak. When he opens the cloak the flowers fall and her image is on the cloth.

What kind of text it is

The account is the Nican Mopohua, printed in 1649 in a Nahuatl volume published by Luis Laso de la Vega, the chaplain at Tepeyac. It is in elegant classical Nahuatl and uses the rhetorical patterns of pre-conquest oratory. A year earlier Miguel Sanchez had published a Spanish account of the apparition.

The detail that carries it

The lady in the story speaks the language of the man she appears to, addresses him with the affectionate diminutives Nahuatl reserves for the humble, and chooses him rather than the bishop as her messenger. That is the point the text is making, and it is a large part of why the account travelled as far as it did.

Whether He Existed

This is one of the few disputes where the atlas can say precisely what is being argued, because both sides have set out their case in print.

The case for doubt

No document of the sixteenth century names Juan Diego or describes the apparition. Juan de Zumarraga, the bishop in the story, left a substantial body of writing and never mentions it. The Franciscan chroniclers of the early Mexican church, including those hostile to the Tepeyac devotion, are silent about it. Stafford Poole set the case out at length in 1995. The earliest accounts date from 1648 and 1649, more than a century after the events they describe, and the tradition of Juan Diego cannot be traced behind them.

The case for the defence

Defenders answer that an absence of documentation is what one would expect for an indigenous commoner in the first generation after the conquest, that indigenous oral and pictorial transmission is not the same thing as a paper trail, and that earlier documents do exist. The most discussed is a small pictorial manuscript bearing the date 1548 and the name Juan Diego, which surfaced in 1995. Its authenticity is itself disputed.

What happened next

He was beatified in 1990. In 1996 the abbot of the Guadalupe basilica said publicly that Juan Diego was a symbol rather than a person, and left his post. In 1998 a group of historians, Poole among them, wrote to Rome asking that the cause be reconsidered. The canonisation went ahead on 31 July 2002.

The atlas records the dispute rather than settling it. What is not in dispute is the devotion, which is one of the largest in the Christian world.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Canonization Mass of Blessed Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, Mexico City, 31 July 2002, Sources

This source names Juan Diego directly: "Mass of Blessed Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin in Mexico City on 31 July 2002, published by the Holy See."

Source Canonization Mass of Blessed Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, Mexico City, 31 July 2002John Paul IIthe holders' own account
Mary, Figures

The figure of the Guadalupe account is identified as Mary.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, Sacred Sites

Tepeyac, where the account places the apparitions.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, 12 December, Observance Rules

This source names Juan Diego directly: "apparition to the Indigenous convert Juan Diego near Mexico City in 1531."

Source Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797Stafford Poole
The Apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Religious Events

The visionary of the Guadalupe account.

The Guadalupe Tilma, Miracles

The tilma was his cloak.

Virgin of Guadalupe Apparition Print, Metropolitan Museum of Art (30.82.244), Sources

This source names Juan Diego directly: "to a man holding a hat (possibly Juan Diego)," an anonymous 19th-century Mexican metal plate engraving."

Source Virgin of Guadalupe Apparition Print, Metropolitan Museum of Art (30.82.244)

Belongs to Tradition

Christianity, Religions

Depicted In

The Virgin of Guadalupe with a Kneeling Man, Possibly Juan Diego (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 30.82.244), Sacred Art & Iconography

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's own title for this engraving identifies the kneeling man only as possibly Juan Diego, a hedge rather than an outright naming.

Source Virgin of Guadalupe Apparition Print, Metropolitan Museum of Art (30.82.244)
Sources
1. Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797
Stafford Poole, University of Arizona Press, 1995
2. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition
F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2005View the Source
3. Canonization Mass of Blessed Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, Mexico City, 31 July 2002
John Paul II, Holy See, 2002the holders' own accountView the Source
Virgin of Guadalupe Apparition Print, Metropolitan Museum of Art (30.82.244)
Metropolitan Museum of ArtDepicted In: The Virgin of Guadalupe with a Kneeling Man, Possibly Juan Diego (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 30.82.244), accession 30.82.244View the Source
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