so juan diego was outside of town. hills, and so it was a miracle occurring in the wilderness. i accept that tepeyac hill was the site of ancient reverences to the earth mother, to mother earth, to tonantzin, our mother. so some people in the church were skeptical. there were monks that were skeptical, that this hadn't happened, that this was the mother of christ, that this was really a form of witchcraft, which they called brujerias, and that juan diego was not actually a messenger of the virgen, but a witch doctor, you know, a brujo, who was in the hands of the devil and doing the devil's work. that may be one of the reasons that juan diego was not officially recognized from the start, although la virgen de guadalupe was. so there are all these historical coincidences, and yet the miracle is that the virgen was a forger of a nation and a forger of the americas. so she is known as the patron saint of the americas because she gave all of the native americans, at least the one south of the border, an identity in this ne