Lisa Sousa; Stafford Poole; James Lockhart sku-645191601

The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega’s Huei tlamahuiçoltica of 1649 is a hardcover Latin American History Books item listed under Lisa Sousa; Stafford Poole; James Lockhart, SKU sku-645191601. Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe has long been part of Mexican religion and national identity. Images of the Virgen morena, or Dark Virgin, are widespread in Mexico and vary in form.

Although many historical and devotional books discuss the legend, close study of its textual sources is more recent. This edition translates and transcribes the complete original Nahuatl text of the 1649 book for English readers, including the apparition story and the book that contains it.

Its philological study offers new perspectives on a text central to Mexican intellectual life: it suggests that a Spanish-Mexican priest may have written it in the mid-seventeenth century using an earlier text by a colleague, rather than drawing on Nahuatl oral tradition.

The story places the Virgin’s apparition to a poor indigenous man less than fifteen years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, but the story did not gain prominence until the mid-seventeenth century. The first known telling appeared in a Spanish book published in 1648 by the priest Miguel Sánchez.

Luis Laso de la Vega, vicar of the Guadalupe chapel and Sánchez’s friend, included the story in Huei tlamahuiçoltica in 1649. His version had little initial impact but became the best-known version by the twentieth century, as indigenism gained prominence. Earlier English translations of Laso de la Vega’s apparition story were popular or devotional.

This edition includes critical apparatus comparing the Sánchez and Laso de la Vega texts and examining linguistic, orthographic and typographical evidence about when and how the text was composed.