Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin

Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (1474–1548) was a Nahua (Aztec) peasant and convert to Christianity whose reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary on the hill of Tepeyac near Mexico City in December 1531 gave rise to the devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe — the most venerated Marian image in the Americas and a symbol of incalculable importance to Mexican and Latin American Catholic identity. Juan Diego was born with the Nahuatl name Cuauhtlatoatzin ('the talking eagle') in the calpulli (community) of Tlayacac in Cuautitlán, about twenty kilometers north of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán. He was one of the indigenous people who converted to Christianity following the Spanish conquest, being baptized around 1524 by one of the first Franciscan missionaries in Mexico. According to the 'Nican Mopohua,' the sixteenth-century Nahuatl-language account of the apparitions, on December 9, 1531, Juan Diego encountered a young woman on the hill of Tepeyac who identified herself as the Virgin Mary and asked him to tell the bishop to build a church on the site. When Bishop Juan de Zumárraga demanded a sign, the Virgin instructed Juan Diego to gather flowers from the hilltop — where Castilian roses bloomed miraculously in the December frost — and present them wrapped in his tilma (cloak). When Juan Diego unfolded his tilma before the bishop, the image of the Virgin was found imprinted on the cloth. The tilma, a simple garment of cactus-fiber cloth that would normally disintegrate within decades, has survived for nearly five centuries and hangs today in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City — one of the most visited Catholic shrines in the world, receiving an estimated ten million pilgrims annually. Scientific analyses of the image have yielded no consensus on its origin, and it continues to be the subject of both devotional reverence and scholarly investigation. The apparition at Guadalupe has been called the most significant evangelizing event in the Americas. Within seven years of the apparition, an estimated nine million indigenous Mexicans accepted baptism. Juan Diego was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002, the first indigenous American saint.