Guadalupe is the single most consequential Marian devotion in the world and the one Anglophone accounts most consistently underweight. The account in the Nahuatl Nican Mopohua has the Virgin appear four times in December 1531 to Juan Diego, an indigenous convert, addressing him in his own language with affectionate diminutives, asking for a church on Tepeyac, and finally leaving her image on his tilma. Every element of the image is read as a codex by scholars of Nahua iconography: the black sash of pregnancy, the position on the moon, the stars on the mantle, the fact that she blocks the sun without extinguishing it. Historians dispute nearly everything about the origins, including whether Juan Diego existed, and the first documentary evidence is from the 1550s; Rome canonised him in 2002 over the public objections of the basilica's own former abbot. None of that has touched the devotion. She is patroness of the Americas, her banner was carried in the Mexican war of independence and by Cesar Chavez's farmworkers, and her feast fills Mexico City with more pilgrims in a week than the Hajj receives in a year.