Nican Mopohua (“Here It Is Told”)

The Nican Mopohua is the earliest account of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the first manifestation of the Virgin Mary in the Americas. In 1531 the Virgin, in the guise of an Indigenous woman, appeared several times to Juan Diego, an Indigenous man. She asked him,  in his language, that a shrine be built in her honor on Tepeyac, a hill located in present-day Mexico City. The incident is recorded in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica (later known as the Aztecs), on high-quality European paper that priests and royal authorities used for religious and political documents. The iron gall ink contained cinnabar, a poisonous mineral that several ancient American cultures considered sacred.



The text’s authorship continues to inspire debate—it is widely, though not definitively, credited to the Indigenous scholar Antonio Valeriano (1521–1605)—but the Nican Mopohua’s cultural and theological significance is without question. The work is considered one of the most influential Nahuatl texts of the Spanish Colonial period. Juan Diego’s traditional cloth garment, called a tilma, where the Virgin’s image miraculously appeared, and the shrine first built in the 16th century, remain cherished symbols for Mexican and Chicano cultures, and for Catholicism worldwide. Today that shrine is much enlarged and known as the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.



The additional materials that were previously on display above the Nican Mopohua were drawn from the Library's extensive collection of documents relating to the apparition and worship of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (colonial Mexico).