Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico: the apparition in 1531 that gave rise to her veneration

The human river begins in the first days of December.

On bicycles, on foot, by long caravans of buses or cargo trucks, millions of Mexicans travel each year to the Basilica of Guadalupe, in the north of Mexico City.

Those days the roads to the capital of the country are saturated with pilgrims. The neighborhood where the sanctuary is located is completely closed.

The day and the night prior to December 12When the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe is remembered, the flow of people does not stop.

Millions of people they meet the annual appointment.

And these are only those who arrive on this day, because the rest of the months the visits are never interrupted. Every year around 20 million people pray in front of the altar of the Basilica.

It is the most important religious celebration in Mexico, and after St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the sanctuary of the Morena Virgin, as it is also known, is the most visited in the Catholic Church.

But beyond the devotion, the image whose origin is located in 1531 It is one of the greatest symbols of identity in Mexico.

“The Virgin of Guadalupe reflects in a very profound way what the popular religiosity of the Mexican people is,” Bernardo Barranco, vice president of the Center for Studies of Religions of Mexico, tells BBC Mundo.

“It is the faith of the simple, of peasants, indigenous people, taxi drivers, workers who do not require large encyclicals, but faith through what has been lived, symbolic expressions such as the festival, the pilgrimage, the family, to process in their own way the adherence to the Marian vocation ”.

The apparitions

The story began in December 1531. According to the Vatican’s documents, on the 9th Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin walked to the Tlatelolco market, the main commercial center of the Aztec people.

When he was passing through a place known as Tepeyac, he met a woman surrounded by an intense light, who said that she was “the always perfect Virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the true God.”

The Catholic tradition tells that the woman asked him to speak with the then bishop Fray Juan De Zumárraga to build a temple in that same place.

The priest did not believe him and asked for proof of what he said. Juan Diego lived three more appearances, the last one on December 12.

That time he received the order to climb to the top of the hill where he found fresh roses, a flower that was not cultivated in December, at that time in Mexico.

It was the beginning of a 487-year-old cult and one that is not without controversy.

At different times, various historians have questioned the existence of Juan Diego and the history of the apparition.

In fact, in archives and writings of De Zumárraga there is no reference to this episode.

But what most agree on is that devotion to the Virgen Morena is part of, and even helped shape, the history of Mexico.

In 1810, for example, the priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla used the image of the Guadalupana in the banner with which he led the start of the war of independence.

A century later, in the Mexican Revolution, the Army of the South led by Emiliano Zapata made the religious image its own, recalls Barranco.

And in the last decades, many migrants in the United States they have also continued their devotion.

In December, In cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles or Chicago, ceremonies are frequent and religious festivities to remember the Guadalupana.

And since 2001 the Guadalupe Torch Race has been held, where thousands of people run from the Basilica of Guadalupe to the Cathedral of San Patricio, in New York.

In that place there is an altar dedicated to the Black Virgin. And those who run and take over a lit torch are migrants.

Foundational tragedy

Mexico is one of the countries with the largest number of faithful of the Catholic Church in the world.

But also since the middle of the last century it is common to hear a very particular religious definition, especially among non-believers.

Many Mexicans do not recognize themselves as Catholics, but rather as Guadalupanos.

It is more than a phrase, as it represents the deep roots of the Virgin of Guadalupe among Mexicans. And it is related to the origin of the country and its society.

In 1531, when the supposed appearances of the Guadalupana occurred, only 10 years had passed since the army of Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec tlatoani, was defeated by the Spanish.

It was a moment of deep depression. The Aztec was a “military despotic” empire, says Bernardo Barranco, which founded its power on the conquest of neighboring towns to whom it imposed tributes.

When in 1521 he was defeated by the Spanish – led by Hernán Cortés – “there are collective suicides, women who become pregnant commit suicide,” says Barranco.

“It is a moment of deep depression of the Nahuatl people in the face of savage submission by the Spaniards “.

In this scenario, the Guadalupana’s apparitions take place at the site where, according to Fray Bernardino de Sahagún –the friar who recounted the moments of the war and the subsequent subjugation– it was originally a site of worship to the goddess Tonantzin.

“Tonantzin Guadalupe”

Tonantzin was one of the most important deities of Mesoamerica, as he was considered the mother of the earth and of all gods.

Barranco says that Fray Bernardino was struck by the fact that, after the apparitions, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people came to Tepeyac from many parts of the territory of what was called New Spain.

The suspicion was that, in reality, it was to render devotion to the Nahuatl goddess. Since then the Guadalupana was also identified as “Tonantzin Guadalupe”.

The name represents “a very deep overlap that gives meaning to what was the meeting of two cultures, the European and the Mesoamerican “.

But it is also something else. The devotion to the Virgin Morena intensifies in moments of tragedy, such as epidemics, floods, civil wars.

On December 12, 1985, months after the earthquake that devastated part of Mexico City, the pilgrimage to the Basilica of Guadalupe was particularly intense.

The same happened in the economic crisis of 1995, known as the “Tequila Effect”, or in 2017, after the earthquake in September of that year, when seven million pilgrims came to the site.

A reflection, says Barranco, of the vision of that protective mother and her shelter for Mexicans.

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