Our Lady of Guadalupe

Originally published in 1995 at the height of the controversy surrounding the beatification (1990) and eventual canonization (2002) of Juan Diego, Stafford Poole's study of the historical evidence in both Spanish and Nahuatl for the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego in 1531 is now available in a revised edition. As well as showing definitively that the standard account of the apparition was an invention of the mid-seventeenth century, Poole also makes a number of other important claims. Despite Bernardino de Sahagún's statement that the Virgin of Tepeyac was dangerously pagan, she was, Poole argues, not a syncretic product of a European Marian devotion and the pre-Columbian cult of Tonantzin (if this word ever referred to a particular Mesoamerican deity at all). Furthermore, the devotion to the apparition story was largely restricted to the ethnically Spanish, not the indigenous population. In other words, the real early modern Guadalupe was not the mestizo mother of the nation that modern Mexican popular religion, the church hierarchy, and the historiography have made her out to be.As in the original edition, from which this revised edition differs only in the addition of a new introduction, the occasional discussion of a new document, and updated bibliographical references (including citations of the important work of David Brading and Jeanette Favrot Peterson), the focus throughout is on the precise evidence for the apparition and the relationship between the cult and the rise of creole patriotism. This means that those looking for an introduction to the life and times of the antiquarians and ecclesiastics who helped build and then eventually began to critique the apparition story should look elsewhere. The focus here is on the precise content and significance of the surviving documentation.When compared to the original edition, the main novelty is the new introduction, a significant proportion of which is taken up with a demolition of the work of Richard Nebel, Serge Gruzinski, Timothy Matovina, and a number of Mexican theologians and ecclesiastics (including Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera), whom Poole takes to task for either their blinkered piety or their uncritical acceptance of standard narratives about the apparition. He also dismisses as a “clumsy forgery” the Codex Escalada, a purportedly sixteenth-century document signed by Sahagún and Antonio Valeriano (who many claim wrote the Nican mopohua) brought to light by a Mexican Jesuit in 1993 (p. 14). In this jeremiad against historical credulity and devotional works masquerading as serious history, Poole does, however, find time to praise the work of Xavier Noguez, Ana María Sada Lambretón, and, to some extent, David Brading.If the book were written de novo today, it would no doubt take a fuller account of the archival work of Cornelius Conover on Mexico City's eighteenth-century cabildo and the recent reframing of the creole patriotism debate by Peter Villella, Tamar Herzog, and me. Indeed, on the latter subject, while Poole makes clear that the devotion was largely restricted to those who claimed and were assigned an identity as Spaniards, the book has a tendency to fixate on the role of a supposed nascent Mexican identity in the formation of the apparition myth. This is a historical development that Poole rather takes for granted, in contrast to the current scholarly consensus that such a historiographical framework can all too easily blend into teleology. While the creole authors discussed in the book certainly celebrated the specific “Mexican” location of the apparition, echoing and citing the words of Psalm 147 (“non fecit taliter omni nationi”), the connection between any embryonic political identity and the gradual rise of the Virgin of Tepeyac is not as self-evident as Poole makes out, which leads him to neglect important countervailing evidence. For instance, he dismisses the foundation of a Guadalupan congregation in Madrid by Philip V in 1743 as an aberration: “Why a criollo devotion would have appealed to a Spanish king is not clear, unless it was an attempt to blunt its political potential” (p. 5). If the book were written today, it would probably also include discussions of the devotion in the Philippines, where it had a significant following among both the Novohispanic diaspora and peninsular missionaries like Gaspar de San Agustín. Considering the historiographical context in which it was written, however, the book as it stands is unimpeachable.In sum, Poole's account remains required reading for all historians of early modern and modern Mexican religion, society, and culture. This revised edition represents the single most comprehensive and most thoroughly researched work on the origin of the apparition story and the rise of what would become a lodestar of Mexican and Chicano culture. This book is the product of a lifetime of careful scholarship and is likely to last several more

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• Hispanism and the Historiography of Colonial Latin America

  Open Access•Kris Lane•Vínculos de Historia Revista del…•2020

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