St. Juan Diego
1474 – 1548
Patron of Indigenous peoples, Mexico
Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (1474–1548) was an Indigenous farmer from near what is now Mexico City. He was baptized at around the age of fifty, a few years after the arrival of the Franciscan missionaries, and was a widower when, in December 1531, the Virgin Mary appeared to him on the hill of Tepeyac. She spoke to him tenderly in his own language, Nahuatl, and asked him to tell the bishop to build a church there.