Cuauhtlatoatzin — 'the one who speaks like an eagle' — was born in 1474 in Cuauhtitlán, a town then on the edge of Lake Texcoco. He was of the Chichimeca people, a commoner who owned a small plot of land, married, and lived an ordinary Aztec life until the arrival of the Spanish.
Baptised, probably by the early Franciscan missionaries, around 1524 — taking the name Juan Diego — he walked the long miles into Tlatelolco each weekend for catechesis and Mass. He was already in his late fifties when, on December 9, 1531, he crossed Tepeyac Hill in the dawn cold on his way to instruction.
There he heard music and a voice calling him 'Juan, little one, the smallest of my children.' The Virgin Mary identified herself in Nahuatl and asked that a church be built on the spot. Four apparitions and the miracle of the tilma followed in five days. After the apparitions Juan Diego went to live as a caretaker in a hut next to the first chapel on Tepeyac, where he received pilgrims and told his story for the remaining seventeen years of his life. He died there in 1548.
He was beatified in 1990 and canonised by John Paul II in 2002 — the first Indigenous person of the Americas raised to the altars.