Our Lady of Guadalupe

Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol 1531-1797 by Stafford Poole, CM, 225 pages

According to the story believed by millions of devotees, over the course of three days in 1531 the Virgin Mary appeared to a Nahua native, St Juan Diego, on Tepeyac hill near Mexico City, the last time leaving a miraculous image of herself on his cloak, which still hangs in the shrine today.  In the traditional retelling, the apparition led to a wave of conversions among the native population, solidly establishing Catholicism in Mexico.  By the end of the eighteenth century, a revisionist account began to develop, questioning the historicity of the apparitions and identifying the Virgin of Guadalupe as an amalgam of Mary and a Mesoamerican earth goddess, providing the natives with an icon of maternal care and rebirth after the trauma of the Conquest.

Poole casts doubt over both of these narratives.  According to his research, the devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe began in earnest not with the native population of Mexico, but with the creoles, and not in the sixteenth century, but in the seventeenth.  It was in the development of this tradition that Guadalupe became one of the chief symbols of Mexican identity.  Poole's command of the primary sources is strong, even if there is enough ambiguity in the early records to question his interpretations, and enough lacunae to cast doubts upon some of his conclusions.  What cannot be doubted, however, are Poole's integrity and learning, making his history an indispensable contribution to research into the origins and development of the Guadalupe devotion.