With the title of Protector of the Indians and bishop-elect (before formal consecration), Juan de Zumárraga arrived in Mexico on December 6, 1528. He is listed in the ecclesiatical chronicles as Archbishop of Mexico 1528-1548.
A very old and battered partial (16 page) Nahautl manuscript copy of the Nican Mopohua, dating c. 1556, can be found at the Public Library of New York.
The Nahuatl document I mentioned before, the Inin huey tlamahuiçoltzin, is kept at The National Library of México.
Yes, I’m sorry, I was incorrect, he was in Mexico earlier, before he went back to Spain, so he could have been around in 1531, I suppose, granting audiences to Aztec peasants. If so, it’s strange that he never seemed to mention this most dramatic event in any of his writings. There are other problems in the account, though, that I find hard to dismiss. For example, claiming the image is miraculous, when it’s clearly a fairly crude painting, is a rather large one.
As for the manuscript, it’s dated to 1556, but that’s just an estimate. We have no date in the manuscript, no author, and no provenance, so it’s an educated guess that may be accurate, or not. We do know for certain that a cult of Guadalupe was mentioned in 1556, by Bustamante, who denounced it as falsely attributing a painting of Mary made by an Indian as a miraculous relic. That sure sounds familiar. I wouldn’t be surprised if that cult had written down its fantasy in manuscript form at some point, and that is what became the basis for the 1649 account.