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Missionaries of the State - The Summer Institute of Linguistics, State Formation, and Indigenous Mexico, 1935-1985 (Hardcover)
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Missionaries of the State - The Summer Institute of Linguistics, State Formation, and Indigenous Mexico, 1935-1985 (Hardcover)
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An account of American missionary activity abetted by Mexican
nationalists. Lazaro Cardenas, president of Mexico 1934-40, is
widely remembered as the most nationalistic and populist Mexican
executive and was demonized by foreign investors scandalized by his
nationalization programs, particularly in the oil industry. Less
well known are his efforts to 'Mexicanize' indigenous populations
and to reduce the power of the conservative Catholic hierarchy by
encouraging anti-clericalism and Protestant evangelical activity.
Common aims therefore united Cardenas and Cameron Townsend, an
American Protestant missionary. With the support of Cardenas and
like-minded Mexican officials, Townsend formed the Summer Institute
of Linguistics, or SIL, a training school for Protestant
missionaries who undertook to learn indigenous languages and to
translate the Bible into those tongues. The official justification
of this project was that the Indians' new vernacular literacy would
serve as a bridge to learning Spanish and thus to assimilation into
the larger national population. If at the same time Townsend's
linguists also served as evangelists of a fundamentalist form of
Protestantism, so much the better; in doing so, the SIL effort
would undermine the Catholic hierarchy, which was seen as a rival
of the Mexican state and its plans for secular national
development. This unusual yet enduring alliance of a national
government not known for friendship to foreigners and an unlikely
collection of North Americans who united scholarship, political
savvy, and religious zeal is this book's topic. The author relates
the development of the SIL from its close association with official
Mexico in the early 1930s to thelate 1970s, when a growing anti-SIL
alliance led by a new generation of Mexican anthropologists induced
the Mexican government to curtail its support for the SIL. Hartch
contributes objectivity to a topic that has been dominated by the
polemics of either SIL supporters or opponents, recognizing the
self-interest that actuated all parties, but also acknowledging
that SIL, whether or not it meant to, empowered and enriched many
indigenous communities through the provision of literacy. Todd
Hartch is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Eastern
Kentucky University.
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