Our Lady of Guadalupe - Name

Name

There is much debate over the original name given to the apparition. According to the earliest account of the apparition, the Nican Mopohua, which was written in the Nahuatl language around 1556, the Virgin Mary told Juan Bernadino, the uncle of Juan Diego, that the image left on the tilma was to be known by the name "the Perfect Virgin, Holy Mary of Guadalupe." In 1675, more than a hundred years later, Luis Becerra Tanco suggested in his work Felicidad de Mexico that the Spanish must have misunderstood Juan Bernardino and Juan Diego, and proposed two alternatives in Nahuatl that sound similar to "Guadalupe", Tecuatlanopeuh, "she whose origins were in the rocky summit", and Tecuantlaxopeuh, "she who banishes those who devoured us." Becerra Tanco based his argument on the fact that the "g" and "d" sounds do not exist in Nahuatl. Three reasons in favor of the original name "Guadalupe" include the fact that Juan Diego and Juan Bernardino would have had to be familiar with the "g" and "d" sounds to pronounce their baptismal names, there is no evidence to show that the Virgin was called anything else before Becerra Tanco's proposal, and the number of documents written by contemporary Spaniards and Franciscan Friars arguing for the name of the Virgin to be changed to "Tepeaca" or "Tepeaquilla," which indicate that indeed the original name was "Guadalupe" and not a native name otherwise there would have been no controversy. There is a general consensus among Nahuatl specialists and historical anthropologists that the word does not have an indigenous origin. It has also been suggested that the name is a Hispanized Nahuatl term that the Virgin used for herself, Coātlaxopeuh, meaning “the one who crushes the serpent” and that it may be referring to the feathered serpent Quetzacoatl.