Our Lady of Guadalupe (Spanish: Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe), also the Virgin of Guadalupe (Virgen de Guadalupe) is a Roman Catholic icon of the Virgin Mary. The tradition relates that on 9 December 1531, Juan Diego, a recently converted Aztec peasant, had a vision of a young woman, a lady, while on a hill in the Tepeyac desert, near Mexico City. The lady in the vision asked him to build a church where they stood on the hill. Juan Diego told the local Bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, of the apparition; doubtful, he asked for proof. Juan Diego later returned to the Tepeyac desert hill; again, the lady appeared to Juan Diego, who told her of the bishop’s request for proof of her apparition. The lady then instructed Juan Diego to go to the hill top, where he found Castillian roses – native to Durango, the bishop’s Spanish home town – and which did not bloom in winter. Juan Diego cut the roses, placed them in the apron of his tilma cloak, and delivered them to the bishop; an imprint of the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared on the tilma, formed by the soil and the Castillian roses.

The tilma icon is displayed in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is among the most-visited Marian shrines in the Roman Catholic religious world.^[1] The icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe is Mexico’s most popular religious and cultural image, it appears bearing the titles: the Queen of Mexico,^[2] the Empress of the Americas,^[3] and the Patroness of the Americas.^[4] Throughout the Mexican national history of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Guadalupan name and image have been unifying national symbols; the first President of Mexico (1824–29) changed his name from José Miguel Ramón Adaucto Fernández y Félix to Guadalupe Victoria in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Father Miguel Hidalgo, in the Mexican War of Independence (1810), and Emiliano Zapata, in the Mexican Revolution (1910) led their respective armed forces with Guadalupan flags emblazoned with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In 1999, the Church officially proclaimed her the Patroness of the Americas, the Empress of Latin America, and the Protectress of Unborn Children.^[5]