The Guadalupan Controversies in Mexico. By Stafford Poole

Abstract

“Mexico was born at Tepeyac,” says an aphorism about the legends surrounding the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to a poor Indian neophyte named Juan Diego. But senior historian Stafford Poole disputes the historical veracity of these apparition narratives and their subsequent embellishments. Poole previously penned Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol (University of Arizona Press, 1995), which, with David Brading's more recent Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe (Cambridge University Press, 2001), offers the most authoritative English-language historical reckonings of the origins of the cult. The Guadalupan Controversies is written for specialists of Latin American religious history, and offers a historiographical account, from early colonial-era New Spain to present-day Mexico, of the scholarly disputes, ecclesial politics, and journalistic imbroglios surrounding the investigation and promotion of devotion to Mexico's national patron, the Virgin of Guadalupe. Poole's book highlights controversies among elites, and his reliance upon clerical sources eclipses attention to the popular role in the cult. Of course, there is no shortage of theological and anthropological interpretations of the popular cult, and in any case, the presumed autonomy of “popular” from “elite” devotions should not be too sharply drawn. But Poole could have included an analysis of the lay devotions that also played a part in the Guadalupan controversies that the book examines. For instance, Poole gives scant attention to the early colonial-era objections of Franciscan missionaries to the “new” Marian devotion under the name of Guadalupe at Tepeyac (40). Franciscan friars in the 1550s denounced the “false miracles” attributed to the shrine's Marian image, which was reportedly painted by a local Indian artist. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún deplored as “idolatry” the fact that Indians flocked to Tepeyac—a site that, according to Sahagún, had formerly hosted festivals dedicated to Tonantzín, an indigenous goddess (210–212, 216). Unfortunately, such reports appear only in an appendix written by another historian, and Poole does not examine these data—other than to caution readers against collapsing these sixteenth-century accounts of Marian devotion at the Tepeyac shrine with the apparition legends that emerged a century later (172). Guadalupan devotion, Poole maintains, originated with the circulation of seventeenth-century apparition legends that were written by clergymen (ix).