Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin was born around 1474 in Cuauhtitlán, north of what is now Mexico City, and was baptized as an adult by the first Franciscan missionaries. On December 9, 1531, walking to Mass, he heard singing on the hill of Tepeyac and met a young woman who asked him to tell the bishop she wanted a church built there.
Bishop Zumárraga asked for a sign. On December 12 Juan Diego gathered roses, out of season, from the hilltop in his tilma, and when he opened the cloak before the bishop the image of the Virgin was on the cloth. The tilma has hung in successive churches at Tepeyac ever since and is displayed today behind the altar of the modern basilica.
Juan Diego lived the rest of his life in a hut beside the first chapel, caring for pilgrims, and died in 1548. St. John Paul II beatified him in 1990 and canonized him at the Basilica of Guadalupe on July 31, 2002, the first indigenous saint of the Americas.