Guadalupe of Tepeyac in the colonial sources
The earliest witness opened here is Sahagún, who describes Tepeyac in the 1570s as a Tonantzin pilgrimage the friars found suspect. The apparition account enters print in the next century, is cited by page and edition in 1755, is denied by the royal chronicler of the Indies, and in 1830 is printed against by an editor who says he would rather not — because a London edition was coming and a silent omission would look like a fraud.
Why this wins its question: Coverage of Guadalupe divides into devotional retelling and flat denial, and both sides quote the same half-sentence of Sahagún without the page around it. This entry opens four digitised originals instead and reports what each one says and when: Sahagún's whole Tepeyac paragraph, including the parallel case of Toci and Santa Ana that shows he was describing a pattern rather than attacking one shrine; Vetancurt's 1698 notice of the shrine's sulphur spring, which mentions the apparition in a chapter on hot water; Eguiara's 1755 citations of Becerra Tanco and Florencia with edition and page, which date the printed tradition; and Bustamante's 1830 explanation that he published the objection because a London edition was coming and silence would have looked like fraud. It also puts on the record the part that neither side quotes — that the same editor called suppression a cruelty and closed by commending the shrine — and states plainly what the sources cannot settle.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The earliest of the sources opened here describes Tepeyac as a working pilgrimage site with a pre-Christian history. Sahagún, in the appendix to book XI of his Historia general, lists three or four places near the mountains where very solemn sacrifices were still made: "El uno de estos és aquí en México, donde está un montecillo que se llama Tepeacac, y los españoles llaman Tepeaquilla, y ahora se llama Ntrâ. Srâ. de Guadalupe." There, he writes, they had a temple dedicated to the mother of the gods "que llamaban Tonantzin, quiere decir nuestra madre", to whose feasts men, women, youths and girls came "de mas de veinte leguas de todas éstas comarcas de México", saying "vamos á la fiesta de Tonantzin".
The same passage records that the Nahuatl name survived the building of the church, and blames the preachers for it: "agora que está allí edificada la iglesia de Ntrâ. Srâ. de Guadalupe, tambien la llaman Tonantzin, tomada ocasion de los predicádores, que á Ntrâ Srâ. la Madre de Dios la llamaban Tonantzin". Sahagún held this a thing to be remedied, "porque el propio nombre de la Madre de Dios señora nuestra, no es Tonantzin, sino Dios y nantzin".
His verdict on the devotion is unambiguous and is stated as suspicion rather than as proof: "Parece ésta invencion satánica para paliar la idolatría bajo la equivocacion de éste nombre Tonantzin", and the pilgrimage "tambien es sospechosa, porque en todas partes hay muchas iglesias de Ntrâ. Srâ., y no van á ellas; y vienen de lejas tierras á ésta Tonantzin, como antiguamente".
Tepeyac is not singled out in that text, which matters for reading it: the next case in the same appendix is the temple of Toci — "nuestra abuela" — near the sierra of Tlaxcala, where a church of Santa Ana had been built and to whose feast the natives still came from more than forty leagues, so that "tambien en éste lugar, parece estar la idolatría paliada"; Sahagún adds that the pestilence of "éste año de 1576" had begun there, and reads the coincidence as a punishment falling where the offence began.
A Franciscan writing at Mexico a century later treats the shrine as settled fact and mentions the apparition in passing, in a chapter on hot springs rather than on miracles. Vetancurt's Teatro mexicano describes, at the Hermita de la Milagrosa Imagen de Guadalupe half a league north of the city, a well of sulphur water "mas tibio que caliente donde han sanado varios enfermos por la virtud de la agua, ò por haverse aparecido en aquel sitio su Milagrosa Imagen"; the well is walled and roofed, ringed with seats, kept under a key, and eight varas in circuit.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the apparition account was a printed literature a Mexican bibliographer could cite by page and edition. Eguiara's Bibliotheca Mexicana, in the Anteloquia, lists among the authorities on Mexican painted books and calendars "Ludovicus Becerra Tanco, in Felicitate Mexicea, seu de Apparitione Imaginis Guadalupiæ Virgineæ pag. 42. Editionis Madritanæ anni 1745" and "P. Florencia in Historia ejusdem Guadalupanæ Imaginis cap. 15. fol. 29. col. 2", in the same series as Torquemada's Monarquía indiana, Cogolludo's history of Yucatan, Vetancurt's Teatro mexicano and Enrico Martínez's Reportorio.
The contradiction between the sixteenth-century text and the printed tradition became, in 1830, a printer's problem. Carlos María de Bustamante states that he published Sahagún's passage "aunque con repugnancia, y despues de haberlo pensado mucho" because D. Felipe María Bauzá had sold a copy of the manuscript to an English bookseller for 135 pounds sterling and a London edition was expected; a suppression would be found on collation and taken "por una superchería mia". His formula for the decision is worth the quotation: "La ley pues de Editor veráz, no me permite hacer semejante omision, muy facil de equivocarse con un fraude."
The same note names the dispute the passage had already fed. Juan Bautista Muñoz, cronista de Indias, denied the apparition, founding himself on a chapter of a letter to Philip II sent by viceroy Martín Enríquez and on Sahagún's then unprinted text, which he had lately drawn by royal order from the library of the Franciscans of Tolosa in Guipúzcoa in order to write the history of the New World commanded by Charles III; against him, Dr. José María Guridi y Alcocer printed in 1820 an "Apología de la aparicion de Ntrâ. Srâ. de Guadalupe de México, en respuesta á la disertacion que la impugna".
Nor was 1830 the first printing of the awkward passage: Bustamante records that it had already been copied literally in the memoirs of the Real Academia de la Historia, tomo quinto, Madrid 1817, page 205, and concludes "Resulta por tanto, que no hé sido yo el primero en dar á luz el trozo que contradice la aparicion, ni en turbar la posesion en que se hallan de creerla piadosamente, los mexicanos".
The editor who printed the objection did not draw the sceptic's conclusion from it, and says so on the same page: it would be a cruelty to take so sweet a consolation from Mexican hearts, he respects "no solo las tradiciones constantes, sino hasta las preocupaciones de los pueblos, sobre todo cuando por ellas se siguen positivos bienes", and he closes wishing that his compatriots may always seek their protection in the Santuario de Tepeyac. The source most often quoted as the anti-apparition document of the nineteenth century thus argues, in its own voice, on the other side.
What these four witnesses establish is the shape of the record, not the truth of the tradition, and the distinction is the point of this entry. Sahagún is evidence for a large pilgrimage at Tepeyac in the 1570s and for Franciscan alarm at it, not for what did or did not happen in 1531; Vetancurt and Eguiara are evidence that by 1698 and 1755 the apparition was assumed and its literature citable; Bustamante is evidence for how the dispute was conducted in print. The narrative texts at the centre of it — Becerra Tanco's Felicidad de México and Florencia's history of the image — are known here only through Eguiara's citations of them, and no sixteenth-century narrative of the apparition was opened for this entry.