Our Lady of Guadalupe didn't just appear
Our Lady of Guadalupe, the mestizo Virgin Mary, appeared to a poor man named Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin in 1531, smack in the middle of the conquest of New Spain. She told him to build a shrine in her honor north of modern-day Mexico City, and, to prove she was real, imprinted his cloak with her likeness — a near indestructible image that, today, has survived dynamite attacks and spills of nitric acid.
Fifteen years later, in 1556, a friar by the name of Francisco de Bustamante boldly denounced the image, arguing that it confused the indigenous people he was trying to convert: was Mary here on earth, or in heaven? He claimed that the cloak was actually painted just the other day by a guy named Marcos. He would have been Marcos Cipac — or as he was known to the Spanish, Marcos Aquino — a Nahua painter trained in the European style and capable of producing works on textiles that, according to a conquistador, "one would not believe that Indians had made."
In 2002, a Mexican microbiologist published an article describing three superimposed paintings he'd found on the miraculous cloak using ultraviolet photography. In fact, there are three Ladies of Guadalupe, layered on one another. The first painting, he reported, included a date, 1556, and was signed with two initials: M.A.