Nican Mopohua
The Nahuatl account of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego at Tepeyac in December 1531, named after its opening words, ‘Here it is told’. It was first printed in Mexico City in 1649.
Read the text at pages.ucsd.edu ↗The printing of 1649, Huei tlamahuiçoltica (John Carter Brown Library copy, Internet Archive) ↗English rendering with line numbers (D. K. Jordan, University of California San Diego) ↗
The account forms the first part of a small Nahuatl book, Huei tlamahuiçoltica, printed in Mexico City by Juan Ruiz in 1649. The licences printed at the front name its author as the bachiller Luis Laso de la Vega, chaplain and vicar of the shrine of Guadalupe. It tells of four meetings between Juan Diego and the Virgin, three visits to the bishop, the flowers gathered in December and the image on the cloak.
The book was printed 118 years after the date it gives for the events. Who wrote the account, and when, is disputed. The catalogue of the John Carter Brown Library, which holds the copy linked here, follows the bibliographer J. T. Medina in saying that it was probably written by Antonio Valeriano (about 1520–1605), a Nahua scholar, and edited by Laso de la Vega. The Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (1474–1548): Biography likewise ascribes it to Valeriano and dates it to 1556. Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 (1995), holds on the contrary that no clear written reference to the apparitions survives from before 1648. A reader should therefore take the text as evidence of how the story was told by 1649, and should weigh separately how far back that telling goes.
Cited in
- 1531, traditional date