Tonantzin

16th century Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún wrote in his Florentine Codex that Indians traveled to Tepeyac to worship Tonantzin.

In her book Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History, Rosemary Radford Ruether wrote: "Sahagún’s protests have been understood in modern times to mean that an Aztec Goddess named Tonantzin had a temple on the hill of Tepeyac, but this has been questioned.

When it was used as a title for Mary, the maternal aspect of the Aztec Goddess could be read into the Spanish Marian cult by Nahua Christians.

This seems to be what happened, rather than the cult of Guadalupe intentionally replacing an earlier temple or cult of an Aztec Mother Goddess at this particular site.” [2]It has been asserted that the word Guadalupe in this appellation may derive from Coatlaxopeuh, meaning "the one who crushes the serpent",[3] and perhaps referring to Quetzalcoatl [citation needed].

Of note here is the historical fact that La Virgen de Guadalupe is of tremendous significance in Mexico, reflecting a pre-Columbian understanding on the part of colonized people that Guadalupe must be understood in relation to Coatlaxopeuh, despite ongoing effort by colonizing forces to erase this historical context.