Professor Jacques Lafaye, (born 21 March 1930) is a French historian who, from the early 1960s has written influentially on cultural and religious Spanish and Latin American history. His most popular work is Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe written in 1974 regarding the formation of the Mexican National Consciousness and includes a prologue by Octavio Paz and is regarded as a keystone for the understanding of the contemporary Mexican culture and is regarded as one of the most comprehensive analyses of the colonial period in Mexico.