Historians studying the Guadalupe tradition have noted that the fullest and most widely known written account of the apparitions, the Nican Mopohua, composed in the Nahuatl language, does not appear in surviving form until more than a century after the events it describes, a gap that has generated sustained scholarly discussion about the tradition's earliest transmission and the degree to which the detailed narrative familiar today reflects the original account as opposed to later elaboration shaped by the devotion's growing importance to Mexican religious and national identity in the intervening period.
Scholars have also examined the image itself, its materials and its style, without reaching a single settled consensus outside the framework of religious belief regarding its origin, a debate distinct from, though related to, the historical questions surrounding the written narrative of Juan Diego's own experience.
Whatever position historians take on these specific questions, the devotion's cultural and religious significance across the following centuries is not in serious dispute: Our Lady of Guadalupe became deeply woven into Mexican national identity well beyond strictly religious contexts, invoked during the Mexican War of Independence and remaining, into the present, one of the most widely recognized Catholic images anywhere in the world.