Nican Mopohua
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The Nican mopohua (Nahuatl: "Here is recounted") is the second section of Luis Laso de la Vega's 36-page tract Huei tlamahuiçoltica...,(1649) (Nahuatl: "The Great happening...") one of the two 1640s texts that popularized the legend of the 1531 apparition of the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Guadalupe to St. Juan Diego, an indigenous Mexican convert to the Roman Catholic Church. While it was the second of the two, (following closely on the heels of Miguel Sánchez's 1648 Imagen de la Virgen María, Madre de Dios de Guadalupe (Spanish: "Image of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God of Guadalupe"), a theological dissertation that was initially taken as the premier document concerning the apparition) in the eighteenth century it took primacy as the seminal record, as it was the only one to be written in an indigenous language.
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Publication and Authorship
The Nican mopohua was written by Licenciado (Spanish: literally "bachelor"; generally meaning someone 'licensed' to practice (secular or canon) law) Luis Laso de la Vega, vicar of the sanctuary of Tepeyac, and published under the auspices of Dr. Pedro de Barrientos Lomelín, vicar general of the Mexican diocese, at the press of Juan Ruiz in 1649. Disputes regarding its authorship have arisen primarily as a response to the work's date of publication, deemed late in comparison to the date of the alleged occurence of the apparition (some 117 years later). In 1666, Lic. Luis Becerra Tanco (1603-1672), a secular priest, affirmed that the Nahuatl account was based on long-standing oral tradition in a deposition for the enquiries of Francisco de Siles, who was commissioned to compile documentation of the continuity of the Virgin's popular cult since the time of her apparition. Becerra Tanco later elaborated on this position in his Felicidad de México (Spanish: "Mexico's Happiness") (1675), claiming that Laso de la Vega's text must have been based on documents created through collaborations between the Franciscan faculty of the College of Santa Cruz Tlatelolco and their indigenous pupils shortly after the apparition itself and purported to have been in the custody of Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxochitl. He even claimed to have seen among these papers "a manuscript book written in the letters of our alphabet in an Indian's hand in which were described the four apparitions of the Most Holy Virgin to the Indian Juan Diego and his uncle Juan Bernardino." Other scholars who have disputed Laso de la Vega's authorship have been Francisco de Florencia, a Jesuit chronicler, who assumed that the "Indian manuscript" mentioned by Becerra Tanco was written by Jerónimo de Mendieta, (d. 1605), a Franciscan missionary and historian in early New Spain, and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Florencia's censor, who, by way of correction of his charge, swore that he "found this account among the papers of Fernando de Alva. [...] The original in Mexican is of the letter of don Antonio Valeriano, an Indian, who is its true author...". No such 'original' manuscript, either in picteographic codex form or in pre-Laso de la Vega manuscript in the Latin alphabet, has ever been discovered. Later scholars have upheld the notion that Becerra Tanco, Florencia, and Sigüenza y Góngora endeavored to authenticate the events of the narrative by placing its 'original' authorship in hands that were both native to Mexico and of greater antiquity than the mid-seventeenth century. Since Mexican petitioners to the Vatican for official recognition of the miracle relied on Sigüenza y Góngora's testimony that the story predated the publication of both the Nican Mopohua and Image of the Virgin Mary, ecclesiastical writers have continued to cite Valeriano as its author.[1][2]
Content, Style, and Structure
The Nican Mopohua relies on dramatic dialogues between Juan Diego and Bishop Juan de Zumárraga to tell the story of the Virgin's apparition on the hill of Tepeyac (or Tepeyacac), her promise to grant the wishes of the Indians who might beseech her, and her demand for a temple on the very spot. In contrast with the account of Sánchez, which focuses primarily on the agreements between Indian accounts of the apparition and Biblical prophecy (most notably Revelation 12:1-2 and 14 and Revelation 21:2), Laso de la Vega's account is related in a poetic style typical of formal Nahuatl dialogue and invokes elements of the dramatic writings of Classical Nahuatl (called autos), many of which were used for the purposes of proselytization during the Spanish colonization of Mexico. Because the apparition, and the purportedly miraculous transposition of the Virgin's image onto on Diego's tilma ("mantle") of ayatl, or maguey cloth, are largely credited with the conversion of the Native American Mexica (Aztecs) and other peoples of Mexico to Roman Catholicism, all documents pertaining to the alleged miracle have been the subject of the intense scrutiny of the Roman Catholic Church, the colonial Spanish Crown (and after 1820, the Mexican government,) scholars of Latin American religion and history, and scholars of classical Nahuatl, as well as independent Guadalupanos, skeptics, and historians the world over.
Critical Response
Today, Catholics (especially those in Mexico and the rest of Latin America) accept the Nican mopohua, whether written by Laso de la Vega, Valeriano, or another, unknown author, as the primordial gospel of the Virgin Mary's personal evangelism to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In the realm of secular scholarship, until recently, authors have uncritically accepted the praise of Baltazar González, a Jesuit professor, Nahuatl speaker, and contemporary of Laso de la Vega, who explained that the Huei Tlamahuiçoltica... "...agrees with what is known of the facts from tradition and the annals." Although there is a small history of the publication of skeptical or critical texts, they found their best manifestation in the publication of Stafford Poole's, Lisa Sousa's, and James Lockhart's Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797, which concluded that Laso de la Vega's narrative was based on Sánchez's Image of the Virgin Mary..., and that the icon was most likely painted by human hands, possibly those of Marcos Cipac de Aquino, an Indian painter from the school of Fray Pedro de Gante. Since then considerable controversy has followed, primarily from the faithful who have supported the divine explanation of the apparition of the Virgin's image.
The Nican Mopohua and Liberation Theology
According to scholar of Mexican religion D.A. Brading, "...the romantic engagement with folk culture that characterized the revolutionary years was eventually taken up by the clergy. Equally important, the effect of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the rise of Liberation Theology was to convert the text into a catechetical instrument, since its emphasis on a poor peasant and his willing acceptance of the Virgin's message, not to mention [Bishop] Zumárraga's intital disdain, responded perfectly to the new-found 'option for the poor'." That is to say, the existence of the Nican Mopohua provided a theological justification of the sanctity not only of the Virgin's apparition, but of the especial sanctity of the indigenous peoples of the American continents to the Virgin Mary and to the Church itself, an idea that was highly prized in the contentious dialogue revolving around the social status of indigenous and poverty-striken people in the Catholic Church that existed during the 1960s-1970s.
References
Brading, D.A.; (2002). Mexican Phoenix : Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-53160-8.
Sousa, Lisa; Stafford Poole, James Lockhart (1998). The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso De La Vega's Huei Tlamahuiçoltica of 1649. UCLA Latin American Studies, V. 84 (Paperback). ISBN 0-804-73483-6.
