Now venerated as the patroness of the Americas, the Virgin of Guadalupe has been an important figure in the religious and civic life of Mexico City since the colonial period. While there are many versions of her miraculous apparition, perhaps none is so arresting as Guadalupe (1724). This remarkable Latin epic retells the meeting between Juan Diego and the Virgin Mary as the final chapter of a spiritual struggle between heaven and hell. In addition to the familiar cast of characters (Juan Diego, the Virgin, the bishop of Mexico), this epic introduces new figures like Pluto, god of the underworld, the Titan Atlas, and the Mexica goddess Tonantzin. While the sequence of events remains unchanged, Guadalupe invents pre-Columbian roots for this divine conflict, roping the history of the Mexica into a providential view of the rise of the Mexican Church.

José Antonio de Villerías y Roelas (1695-1728) was an accomplished poet of Latin, Greek, and Spanish verse. Born in Mexico City, Villerías received a scholarship to attend the Royal University of New Spain, where he studied law before entering civil service. Though he died young, Villerías left behind three publications––La Máscara (1721), Llanto de las Estrellas (1725), and Escudo triunfante (1728) ––as well as an extensive collection of unpublished work, now held in the National Library of Mexico (Ms. 1594). These writings attest to the young man’s social circle, since he often wrote to commemorate the accomplishments of civic and religious leaders in the viceregal capital. Ms. 1594 preserves a miscellany of poetry and prose, ranging from occasional compositions to devotional hymns and erudite reflections, written in Spanish, Latin, and Greek. But perhaps the most ambitious composition Villerías left behind was his epic about the Virgin of Guadalupe, written in 1,755 Latin hexameters.

After an invocation and brief account of the conquest of Tenochtitlan––the Mexica capital, which the Spanish re-founded as Mexico City––the poem begins with two councils of the gods: one between Pluto and Tonantzin on Tepeyac and the other between the Virgin Mary and members of the Trinity in heaven. After successfully pleading her case, the Virgin Mary descends to earth and asks Juan Diego to instruct the Bishop of Mexico to build a new chapel in her honor on Tepeyac. After Pluto and Tonantzin sow mistrust between the bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, and Juan Diego, the Virgin appears to Juan Diego a second time to encourage him. At the start of Book 2, Pluto and Tonantzin visit Atlas under Lake Texcoco, the body of water encircling Mexico City, where they learn that the Virgin will eventually defeat them. Juan Diego meets with the bishop, but Pluto and Tonantzin once again intervene to discredit this Indigenous man. The Virgin then appears to Juan Diego a third time and asks him to meet her on Tepeyac the following day.

In Book 3 Pluto pays a visit to Cocolistus, a personification of a local disease, who then infects Juan Diego’s uncle, Bernardino. The Virgin appears to Juan Diego a fourth time, promises to heal Bernardino, and sends Juan Diego to gather flowers on Tepeyac. Although it is the middle of winter, Juan Diego finds a meadow blooming on the summit. He collects flowers in his cloak and hurries to Mexico City, where he meets with the bishop for the last time in Book 4. The poet invokes the angels, the Holy Spirit, the Muse, and the Nymphs, before describing the miraculous image of the Virgin on Juan Diego’s cloak. The crowd marvels at the miracle, the bishop believes, and the poet hails Juan Diego as the New Spanish St. John the Evangelist. The epic concludes with an ekphrasis of the sacred image.

As a criollo, the descendant of Spaniards born in the Americas, Villerías was one of many authors experimenting with new ways to express allegiance to Spain as well as to the land of their birth. Some, like Villerías, began to consider the pre-Columbian Incas and Mexica as their classical heritage, the Greeks and Romans of the New World. For this reason, Guadalupe offers an ekphrasis of Mexica history on the murals of Atlas’s sublacustrine home in Book 2 and includes native flowers like cempohualxochitl among the Spanish roses growing in the meadow in Book 3. Guadalupe blames the goddess Tonantzin for enslaving the Mexica to demonic rites, thereby exonerating the Mexica from wrongdoing. Classicizing elements are particularly apparent in the retelling of Indigenous history, inviting comparison between pre-conquest Mexico and the ancient Mediterranean and between the rise of Tenochtitlan and the founding of Rome. By claiming the Indigenous past as their own, criollos sought to position themselves as the spiritual descendants of the ancient Mexica, heirs to their empire in this region of the Spanish Empire. Guadalupe is no exception to this pattern, though it is perhaps one of the most original articulations of Mexican exceptionalism from this period.

*Adapted from Chapter 3 of Empire’s Companion: Virgilian Epics from Colonial Ibero-America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). Copyright © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.