Traditional account of the Virgin of Guadalupe
The Nican mopohua is considered to be the "primordial account" of the apparition because it is written
in the indigenous Nahuatl language. It describes the 1531 meeting between La Virgen and Saint Juan Diego
on Tepeyac.
In the Nican mopohua, "it had been ten years since [...] Mexico had been conquered" when
Juan Diego, a widowed convert to Roman Catholicism, was on his way to "attend to divine things"
when, upon passing the hill of Tepeyac, the sky became bright and he heard "singing on top of
the hill, like the songs of various precious birds". He stopped, wondering if he was in "Xochitlalpan",
"a preconquest Nahuatl expression for heaven or a place of bliss". At the end of the song,
as he stood looking toward the top of the hill, he heard a woman calling him from there. At the
top of the hill he saw a young lady whose "clothes were like the sun". He prostrated himself
in front of her, and she asked him where he was going. He replied that he was going to her "home"
of Mexico-Tlatelolco to hear the sermons of the friars there. The woman then identified herself
as "the eternally consummate virgin Saint Mary, mother of the very true deity, God, the giver of life,
the creator of people, the ever present, the lord of heaven and earth." She then asked Juan Diego
to relate to the Bishop her wish for a temple to be built on the very spot, where she would attend
to the "weeping and sorrows" of "you and all the people of this land, and of the various peoples
who love me", "in order to remedy and heal all their various afflictions, miseries, and torments."
The Virgin is said to have asked Saint Juan Diego to pick Castilian roses from the top of Tepeyac hill,
and to gather them in his tilma (cloak) to present to Bishop Juan de Zumárraga as proof of Her
miraculous presence. (Castilian roses were not common in Mexico in 1531, and certainly not in the dead
of winter.) When Juan Diego opened his cloak to show the roses to the Bishop, it is said that both men
were astonished to see the image of the Virgin emblazoned on its cactus fabric.
The Nican mopohua is not the first published document regarding the apparition, but it is the most
highly regarded. There is controversy regarding its authorship: many believe it was written in the sixteenth
century by a Nahuatl speaker named Antonio Valeriano; others believe it was the seventeenth-century
creation of Tepeyac's vicar Luis Laso de la Vega. The debate over authorship is fierce: it is generally
felt that advocates for Laso de la Vega are denying the historicity of the apparition account.