Ever since the mid-seventeenth century, the account of miraculous revelations bestowed upon a humble Nahua by a dark-skinned Virgin Mary has captivated the collective consciousness of what we have come to call Mexico. Through a brilliant and exacting examination of the sources, composition, lexical features, and contrasting registers of language of the earliest printed Nahuatl-language account about the Guadalupan apparitions (1649), this deceivingly slender volume significantly advances our understanding of the emergence and editorial consolidation of such a compelling narrative. Furthermore, the authors’ lucid translation, which runs alongside the Nahuatl text, makes the entire text available to English-speaking audiences for the first time.

For the benefit of a broad audience of specialists and history students, the authors have prepared a modernized version of the Nahuatl imprint that retains some fascimilar characteristics —the original orthography, typographical divisions, and diacritics—but improves upon them by using contemporary word spacing and thematic paragraphs. Even though the interpretation of the text’s unsystematic diacritics and orthography may challenge less-experienced students of Nahuatl, the authors’ appraisal of these issues on pages 28-35 not only addresses this difficulty, but also stands on its own as a critical tool for mystified readers of midcolonial Nahuatl imprints and manuscripts.

The authors settled on a highly idiomatic Enghsh translation policy rather than on a more literal but somewhat belabored approach. The major point of contention that a literalist approach would raise concerns the handling of reverential forms. Even if translating the ubiquitous reverential suffix –tzin would give most readers a headache, translating the reverential forms of verbal phrases—both reflexive (marked by the affix -tzinoa) and nonreflexive (marked by the otherwise reflexive prefix two)—would have illustrated to readers of various competences the selective deployment of this Nahua discursive convention. Throughout the text, Juan Diego merely hears and sees, while the Virgin deigns to see and kindly hears. This reverential distinction is invisible in the authors’ translation.

Is Huei tlamahuiçoltica the product of a Nahua-creole collaborative project? Little is known about its author beyond the fact that in 1649 he was chaplain and vicar of Tepeyácac’s Guadalupe chapel in 1649. Nonetheless, the authors offer an exhaustive analysis of internal evidence about contrasting registers of language in the text—on the one hand, standard ecclesiastical Nahuatl; on the other, mundane and even dialectal features. While much of the text reports elaborate rhetorical exchanges, usage of the variants miac (much) and -ta (past modal auxiliary) betrays a less-educated register; moreover, morphological and syntactical slips and Nahuatl caiques from Spanish suggest a non-native intuition at work. Given the various interpretations supported by this evidence, the authors propose, rather than conclude, that a “Guadalupe Nahuatl Project” featuring Luis Laso de la Vega and one or more highly educated Nahua assistants composed the Huei tlamahuiçoltica.

This Guadalupe team would have collected material from previously existing oral, written, and pictorial apparition accounts, some still unknown and others well attested — like Miguel Sanchez’s 1648 Spanish-language narrative and Samuel Stradanus’s early-seventeenth-century engraving, therewith arriving at a grand total of 14 miracle stories. Given the omnivorous tendencies of seventeenth-century authors of Nahuatl doctrinal texts, this work may reflect the compilation of rather diverse written and oral sources, which could have begun well before the 1649 publication date. Although the question of sources must remain open for lack of data, the authors’ tour de force demonstrates that the contrast between Laso de la Vega’s eloquent, exhaustive, and compelling narrative and Sanchez’s terser Spanish-language publication accounts for the prominent role that Huei tlamahuiçoltica has played in the development of a standard narrative about the Guadalupan apparitions.