Our Lady of Guadalupe (Spanish: Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe), also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe (Spanish: Virgen de Guadalupe; Nahuatl: Tonantzin Guadalupe) is a celebrated Catholic image of the Virgin Mary.
According to tradition the image appeared miraculously on the cloak of Juan Diego, a simple indigenous peasant, on the hill of Tepeyac near Mexico City on December 12, 1531. Today it is displayed in the Basilica of Guadalupe nearby, the most visited Catholic shrine in the world. The Virgin of Guadelupe is Mexico's most popular religious and cultural image, with the titles "Queen of Mexico", "Empress of the Americas", and "Patroness of the Americas"; Miguel Hidalgo in the Mexican War of Independence and Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution both carried Flags bearing the Or Lady of Guadalupe, and Guadalupe Victoria, the first Mexican president changed his name in her honour.
The iconography of the Virgin is impeccably Catholic: Miguel Sanchez, the author of the 1648 tract Imagen de la Virgen María, described the Virgin's image as the Woman of the Apocalypse from the New Testament's Revelation 12:1, "arrayed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars." The image has also been described as a representation of the Immaculate Conception. Yet despite this orthodoxy the image also contained a hidden layer of coded messages for the indigenous people of Mexico which goes a considerable way towards explaining her popularity:
"The Aztecs…had an elaborate, coherent symbolic system for making sense of their lives. When this was destroyed by the Spaniards, something new was needed to fill the void and make sense of New Spain…the image of Guadalupe served that purpose."
Her blue-green mantle was the color reserved for the divine couple Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl; her belt is interpreted as a sign of pregnancy; and a cross-shaped image symbolizing the cosmos and called nahui-ollin is inscribed beneath the image's sash. Pulque, an alcoholic beverage made from the fermented sap of the maguey and considered sacred by the Aztecs was drunk on her feast day, and a 1772 report described the rays of light around Guadalupe as maguey spines.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe
