TODD HARTCH. Missionaries of the State: The Summer Institute of Linguistics, State Formation, and Indigenous Mexico, 1935-1985. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2006. Pp. xxi, 245. $39.95

Abstract

This monograph is a careful and interesting look into the development and activities of the controversial Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), a religious/political/scientific organization that became entrenched in the Mexican countryside after its establishment there in 1933. Todd Hartch searches for the reasons that President Lázaro Cárdenas not only permitted but encouraged a Protestant missionary organization, and one from the United States at that, to become involved working with Mexico's indigenous population only a few years after the end of a revolution that was anti-clerical in nature. The answer, he finds, is a combination of goals and strategies. First, the nationalistic Mexican government wanted to make use of the organization's offer to learn native languages, develop alphabets, and write primers for teaching so that the groups so served might be brought into a more homogenous, unified nation. Its religious nature was not necessarily a plus, but not much of a minus, as the powerful Roman Catholic Church was the target of its concern rather than the less threatening and, in domestic political terms, almost totally powerless organization studied here. And second, the original founders of the organization, Cameron Townsend and L. L. Legters, severed all ties with religious institutions in the United States, in particular the fundamentalist Central American Mission, before trying to gain the permission of the Mexican government to work there. Third, the founders were shrewd about making important connections within the Mexican government, initially through the leading American scholar working on Mexico, Frank Tannenbaum of Columbia University, and then on their own. Fourth, they offered a service that the Mexican government officials believed was crucial but that, in the years of rebuilding after the revolution, they could not afford to undertake themselves. It was, in effect, an offer they could not refuse. These important considerations and mutual interests and needs kept the SIL operating in a reasonably comfortable relationship with Mexican administrations for many years. While the SIL eventually became involved with the Wycliffe Bible Translators in providing indigenous-language versions of the New Testament, evangelization was not heavy-handed. Still, it sometimes had profound consequences as communities became religiously and politically divided.