Every eleventh of December, Mexicans await the arrival of the next day with special joy and fervour, prepared with a mariachi serenade and the traditional song of Las Mañanitas, since barely twelve o'clock At midnight the celebrations of the day of the Guadalupe mamita begin. The Virgin of Guadalupe is also venerated in many other Latin American countries and it is estimated that to celebrate this day, six million pilgrims from all over Mexico and the world will have visited her basilica. It is undoubtedly one of the best-known Catholic festivities. Her devotion began 482 years ago with four apparitions, known as the Mariophanies that occurred in 1531.
According to the Guadalupan story known as Nican Mopohua, precisely in the last one, which occurred on December 12 of that year, the Virgin ordered the Indian Juan Diego to appear before the first bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, to whom he carried some roses in his ayate (cloak for harvesting the harvest), flowers that are not native to Mexico and that do not thrive in the aridity of the territory where he cut them, known as Tepeyac . When unfolding his ayate before the bishop, Juan Diego dropped the roses but also discovered the image of the Virgin Mary, dark and with mestizo features, printed on her humble mantle.
This story, Nican Mopohua, attributed to the indigenous Antonio Valeriano (1522-1605) and published in 1649 by the priest Miguel Sánchez in his book Image of the Virgin Mary Mother of God of Guadalupe, contributed to widely spread the Guadalupe devotion. It is precisely through this and other means that the possibility of unifying the two cultures is achieved, which for Fray Toribio de Benavente, in a well-known letter to Carlos V, was seen as humanly impossible without the intervention of Saint Mary.
Those two worlds hitherto unknown and enemies to each other, with plenty of reasons to harbor hatred for the defeat of the Indians now defeated, and for the contempt and exploitation by of the newcomers began to recognize themselves in this tangible symbol of Mary, image of the Church, announced through a converted Indian and welcomed by all as a liberating reality.
This fact leads to an inculturation of the Christian event in the Mexican and Latin American cultural world. In those painful pages of the history of colonization there is continuity through the Guadalupan historical tradition that keeps a people alive and gives a new dimension to its future.
This was recognized by the Mexican liberal thinker Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, a mestizo who fought in the liberal ranks of Juarez in the War of Reform, and against the French Intervention:«If there is- a truly ancient, national and universally accepted tradition in Mexico, is the one that refers to the Apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe (...) There is no one, neither among the wildest Indians, nor among the most uneducated and abject mestizos who ignores the Appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe... Not only all the races that inhabit Mexican soil are in harmony with it, but what is even more surprising are all the parties that have bloodied the country for half a century (...).
Ultimately, in desperate cases, the cult of the Mexican Virgin is the only link that unites them (...) The deep social division (...) also disappears, only before the altars of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Everyone is equal there, mestizos and Indians, aristocrats and commoners, poor and rich, conservatives and liberals (...) The authors (of the Guadalupan tradition) were the Spanish bishop Zumárraga and the Indian Juan Diego who took communion together at the social banquet, with reason for the Apparition, and that are presented in the popular imagination, kneeling before the Virgin on the same step (...) In each Mexican there is always a more or less large dose of Juan Diego».
This joint experience achieved what the wars could not, an identification of the new Mexican people and by extension Latin America, with the influences of the conquerors but without declining their pride for the world by they belonged, developing a new ability to coexist and relate even when the process was not easy or painless. In the hardest moments, the Virgin of Guadalupe, loving and miraculous mother, was always present, protecting her children without making differences between them.
The Catholic Church recognized the importance of Juan Diego in the Guadalupe miracle and on May 6, 1990, he was beatified in the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City, during the second apostolic trip to Mexico of Pope John Paul II and finally canonized in 2002 by John Paul II himself. The Catholic Church celebrates his feast day on December 9.
Currently, the celebrations for December 12 continue the integrating and multicultural message of devotion to the Guadalupana, to the morenita as they affectionately call her, because even her centers of Pilgrims from all corners of the world come to devotion, even on their knees, dances are performed and pre-Columbian songs of great color and roots are sung at the same time as all kinds of traditions acquired from the ancient world and expressions of contemporary culture. Without a doubt, one more sample of the integrating action of the Virgin of Guadalupe that also transcends the passage of time.