Misioneros y civilizadores: Protestantismo y modernización en el Perú (1915–1930)

Abstract

This study explores, as its title implies, the impact of the Protestant missionary movement in Peru, primarily during the second administration of liberal, reformist president Augusto B. Leguía. It is groundbreaking in being one of the first (in an admittedly scant historiography) to examine the missionary movement in Peru from a Peruvian perspective. The bulk of the literature, as Fonseca Ariza notes, falls into two categories: (1) ideological and typically apologetic work produced by Protestant leaders and missionaries themselves, and (2) academic research, also highly ideological, primarily concerned with interrogating social conflict and the influence of foreign (mainly U.S.) hegemonic entities in the country. Fonseca’s stated objective, by contrast, is to take a bottom-up view of how internal factors within Peru utilized missionaries and their projects to advance a highly secular project of development and, less intentionally, to open a new “technology of knowledge.”Developmentalist/pro–foreign investment politics and missionary agendas intersected neatly in Peru, as they did in many parts of Latin America. They shared an interest in “modern” projects, especially education—a gaping hole in societies where the reformist state had reified the notion of an educated citizenry but banned popular education in the form of Catholic parochial instruction. By contrast, Protestant missionaries offered well-trained teachers, modern curricula, and a willingness to expend huge amounts of pedagogical capital, all at their own expense. The lure of mission-run educational and health programs, all packaged together with a “modern” (read “American”) culture and ethics, posed an almost irresistible enticement to Latin American regimes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This attraction had little to do with religion per se, but a great deal to do with “modernity,” a notion summed up by Mexico’s Benito Júarez, who invited U.S. missionaries into his country with the declaration: “We want our people to learn to read instead of light candles.”Populist Leguía’s second and highly influential term (El Oncenio) lasted from 1919 to 1930, more than a generation later than the late-nineteenth-century wave of liberal reform that swept through much of the rest of Latin America. Leguía sought to modernize Peru’s economic and political systems and to tame labor and the emerging Left. He also attempted to solve its “Indian problem” through education and cultural assimilation. As early as the 1920s, intellectuals deemed this model ideologically outdated, and progressive writers such as Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and José Carlos Mariátegui soon challenged it.Fonseca nicely contextualizes missionary work within this political milieu. Protestant missionaries—mostly from the United States but also from United Kingdom—had arrived in Peru a decade earlier, a smattering of Reformational denominations such as Presbyterians and the Free Church of Scotland, holiness churches, Methodists, and agents of Bible societies. Schooled in the Social Gospel, these groups worked quickly to establish not only congregations but also clinics, sanitation projects, and, most importantly, schools. It was not until the Oncenio, however, that missionary and state ideals began to run a parallel course—if not, as Fonseca suggests, precisely converge. In the largely indigenous sierra, missionaries helped expand basic services such as the education, health care, and alcohol awareness, and they promoted new agricultural technologies that supported the government’s assimilationist goals. Perhaps not surprisingly, such efforts netted few converts among the indigenous population, which saw little merit in being “developed” either by missionaries or the state.Mission work did make a lasting impact, however, in the area of urban education. Protestant schools or Protestant ideas clearly influenced a generation of middle-class Peruvian intellectuals, most notably APRA founder Haya de la Torre (who, Fonseca notes, taught for a time at the Protestant Colegio Anglo Peruano in Lima). This topic merits further study. Fonseca notes that some U.S. missionaries—mostly from the more progressive denominations such as the Presbyterians and Methodists, and enamored of Spanish thought and culture—fully engaged in the intellectual debates of the day. Their positioning as foreigners and teachers in some cases lent them a freedom to express ideas that others might not have enjoyed. Fonseca uses the example of John A. MacKay, the head of the Colegio Anglo Peruano. MacKay also popularized and disseminated the work of the Spanish intellectual Miguel A. Unamuno, whose writing would influence a generation of existentialist thinkers in Peru and elsewhere in South America.This careful study challenges us to reassess our understanding of the early influence of missionaries in Peru and elsewhere in Latin America, which in the final analysis seems to have less to do with converts and “empire building” than with the long-term impact of Protestant institutions. Indeed, it was mission schools that may have provided the intellectual space (in a authoritarian society) for the political and social ferment that eventually helped to bring an end to the Oncenio.