This article focuses upon Bolivian teachers employed by a Protestant evangelical mission originating from early-twentieth-century New Zealand, rather than from the British or North American metropole. It is written with a keen awareness of historical and historiographical location. Education was a primary expression of European expansion in the modern era and, in the British context, its relationship with imperialism and missions is well attested.Footnote 1 A recent volume on missionary infant schooling amongst indigenous children indicates, however, that how people conceive of missionary education and imperialism is changing. By focusing on three nineteenth-century British colonial settings—India, Canada, and New Zealand—the authors take a transnational approach that accentuates both the complex global transfer of ideas and the geographical particularities, or “minutiae,” of educational practice, adaptation, engagement, and resistance. In so doing, they highlight how indigenous children’s education was “entangled in empire and missionary endeavour.”Footnote 2 Until recently, the historiography of British imperial expansion, and of the consequent colonial impact on indigenous peoples, has tended to take a centre-periphery approach emphasising mutual transferences (of people, ideas, cultural artefacts, and goods) between the northern British metropole and its geographically dispersed colonial spaces. As the book noted above signals, however, a conceptual turn over the last decade or so has utilised the imagery of the web to indicate the multiple, non-centric and interrelated links between various parts of empire, from the local to the international. This turn emphasises a “multi-sited” approach to imperial history “that neither privileges the metropole nor accepts the nation-state as the self-evident unit for historical analysis.”Footnote 3
This conceptual approach is relevant for a discussion of missions and education, both as subjects of intrinsic importance and as constitutive elements of European expansion. The trajectories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Protestant missionary activity did not always follow the arc of imperial expansion, yet the movement reflected and refracted predominant European perspectives and priorities. Just as significant, missionary activity was never unidirectional. Missionary infant schooling, for example (cited above), reflected ideas, pedagogies, and practices emerging simultaneously from the British metropole and from within each colonial setting, which consequently moved through and across boundaries at different angles. At the same time, missions, with their educational programmes, originated in specific nation states, but whose agendas were not necessarily bound or defined by the national rhetoric of those states. Missions and missionaries were distinctly transnational in outlook and disposition, even if their activities were culturally or theologically circumscribed. Therefore, a focus on missions and education complicates the ways in which we might think about European expansion.
This article is written with these broader considerations in mind. It focuses on the place of local teachers in Bolivia and their relationship with one evangelical Protestant mission, the Bolivian Indian Mission (BIM), which originated in New Zealand in the early 1900s. It takes a non-metropole and a “multi-sited” approach to missions and education. Its underlying argument is, first, that knowledge about Bolivian teachers was mediated through the missionary voice and, second, that these teachers negotiated their lives within a particular missionary space (Bolivia) in which, while not strictly part of the British Empire, there operated a number of intersecting influences from other sites within the wider imperial or Western network. The aims are twofold: to reclaim the identities of Bolivian teachers (up to the early 1930s) and to reflect critically on some of the intrinsic or emergent methodological and conceptual issues. In particular, this article argues that the extant sources, while problematic, can be read tangentially and productively in ways that further elucidate: the discursive power of missionary attitudes towards Bolivian teachers; the resulting site-bound nature of these teachers’ conflicted status; and both the presence and potential power of an indigenous teachers’ voice within mission structures. As such the article builds upon an earlier essay that outlined why education loomed so large on the agenda of a mission ostensibly focused on evangelistic imperatives. In that earlier essay I used the concept of sitesFootnote 4 to argue that this focus might be explained by “considering a set of complex and overlapping factors operating at one missionary ‘site’ . . . [thus] providing a model of how to construct a complex reading that enables us to discern multiple layers of voices and motivations, and of how to theorise the missions–education relationship in a particular context.”Footnote 5 That approach considered the intersection of missionary background or origins, local Bolivian politics and educational policies, and indigenous families’ priorities. Here in this article the bodies, voices, and activities of Bolivian teachers, hitherto hidden and poorly understood, are now added to that wider consideration of the BIM’s educational focus, as a case study of European expansion.
Historical and Methodological Background
By way of introduction, Bolivian teachers within the BIM need to be understood within two wider contexts. The first was extrinsic to Bolivia. The BIM was begun in 1908 by George and Mary Allan, first-generation settler New Zealand Presbyterians. Its story has been recounted by two in-house narrative histories (one by the Allans’ daughter), and by scholarly essays focused on the emergence of colonial-based missions, the writing of transnational history, and the BIMs educational focus.Footnote 6 Initially an Australasian mission, the BIM progressively became more Americanised but always retained its links with Australasia and also Britain. By the mid-1920s, American personnel and finances were dominant, and missionaries came from a wide cross-section of classical Protestant denominations.Footnote 7 Its initial operations focused upon the central highland Bolivian town of San Pedro, expanding into northern Bolivia in the late 1920s. From 1932 the mission’s base was transferred to the larger and more central city of Cochabamba, a geographical move designed to connect the mission more effectively with the rest of Bolivia.Footnote 8 The BIM was modelled on the faith mission principles of the China Inland Mission, which emphasised both dependency on God and mission as conversion. Therefore its primary focus was on “evangelising the Indians of Bolivia by means of itinerant and localised work,”Footnote 9 on addressing the perceived spiritual and physical needs of both Indians and other Bolivians, and on combatting Roman Catholicism. While these priorities changed little over time, in reality the BIM established a strong educational focus both as a form of evangelism and as a means of socio-economic uplift for indigenous communities. By the deaths of Mary (in 1939) and George (1941) this focus was well-entrenched. Education became a significant expression of mission and more than simply a “means used for gaining an entrance into new places,”Footnote 10 a reductive notion that has prevailed across other readings of modern-era missionary education.Footnote 11
At the same time, local Bolivian dynamics also help to explain the BIM’s early and fully committed involvement in education.Footnote 12 The BIM’s entry to Bolivia in the early 1900s coincided with a period of demographic change, relative political stability, and a degree of socio-political reform. In terms of national demography, indigenous, mixed, and Spanish populations intermingled more complexly by the late nineteenth century, especially in the concentrated transition zones connecting rural hinterlands and the growing towns or cities.Footnote 13 Politically, the long nineteenth century was marked by “anarchy, misery and tyranny,”Footnote 14 with frequent regime change, a series of civil and territorial wars, and constitutional instability.Footnote 15 From 1899 until at least the 1930s, a succession of Liberal governments instituted a protracted period of reform that, amongst other things, focused on secularising civil society and ameliorating long-standing social and ethnic inequalities in an attempt to “uplift and integrate [Bolivia’s] indigenous populations” (see below).Footnote 16 Civil marriage legislation, establishing non-religious education and addressing the lack of rural schools for mixed or indigenous communities were concrete expressions of this. A comprehensive indigenous education policy did not emerge until at least the early 1930s (and more properly in the 1940s),Footnote 17 but at the same time there were spasmodic attempts to establish schools for Quechua and Aymara children from at least the early 1900s. Coinciding with this was a measure of agitation for education from within indigenous communities, who were feeling left out with respect to rural and indigenous schooling policies. At the heart of this agitation was a stated parental desire for children to be more politically and socially empowered through literacy in the Spanish language, so that they would no longer be “at the mercy of the whites and cholos.”Footnote 18
The position of Bolivian teachers, within these contexts, is not yet well understood. In part this reflects a prevailing and more general “absence,” across histories of missionary education, “of the Indigenous recipients” and of “their families and communities.”Footnote 19 Particularly problematic is the dilemma of being “tied to the imperial archive created by colonizers [among others]” and thus only being able to tell one side of the story. In the present context, again reflecting a general trend, this is reflected in the “one-sided recording of missionary education” by missionaries or European mission school teachers.Footnote 20 This is apposite for the BIM’s story, as the extant records for the period were produced by missionaries in the English language. There is very little material produced directly by Bolivian participants and, where it does exist, it is both edited and translated. It is likely that because Bolivian participation in the mission increased after World War II (when the mission grew into an indigenous church structure), then more of the written record would be in Spanish or Quechua. In an oral culture, and one in which levels of formal literacy were not high, what may have existed of an indigenous voice at the time has since largely been lost.
While not denying these underlying problems, this article argues that these “one-sided” sources are still valuable. In this archive we find the regular presence of Bolivian teachers who were clearly important within the life of the BIM. However, they do need to be looked for carefully and systematically. In many of the older and larger missions, especially of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, indigenous workers variously labelled “native teachers,” “native preachers” or “native workers” commonly existed as a published statistical category.Footnote 21 In the BIM, however, these people were mostly recorded as individual names (albeit with varying spelling), but not in any ordered lists or reports. Statistical reporting was not George Allan’s preferred style. This served to humanise these individuals in the missionary archive and says something, perhaps, about the complexities of underlying European attitudes.
Bolivian teachers’ names and details emerge from two main sources: the regularly published magazine, The Bolivian Indian, Footnote 22 and the minutes of the Field Committee (from 1923 renamed as the Field Council). Written by the non-Bolivian missionary staff, the magazine provided reports, accounts of mission progress, and stories in which Bolivian teachers were referred to mostly by name, although unnamed workers also appeared in these texts.Footnote 23 There were occasional reports by Bolivian employees translated into English. The Bolivian Indian also provided some photographs of local workers, the originals of which may no longer exist. In this respect, while acknowledging that these magazines were obvious contrivances and intrinsic cultural constructions,Footnote 25 they also act as significant historical sources of information and repositories of otherwise lost images. Field Minutes tended to refer to named Bolivian workers mostly in the context of employment-related discussions. This latter source also indicates that Bolivian teachers were referred to in missionaries’ correspondence (not now extant) and that they made oral submissions to the Field Council. Occasionally more details were also included in later publications about the BIM. The method adopted here was to first search through every magazine from 1911 to 1932 (when the focus of the mission began to broaden), and to record the details chronologically. A second search was made in the Field Minutes, which produced further names and details. A database of the known cohort was then constructed, with the working assumption that it underrepresents total numbers of Bolivian teachers. The following reconstruction and discussion is the result of that search.
Who Were They?
A few schools were established in and around San Pedro within three years of the BIM’s establishment. They were rudimentary in structure and pedagogy, with small enrolments and irregular timetables. The clay-walled classroom attached to the home of Horace and Ada Grocott in 1910, for Indian children on a nearby hacienda, was typical of such early missionary-run schools.Footnote 26 It took at least six years before there was any record of local people engaged as teachers or assistants (table 1). This slow adoption may have reflected entrenched missionary attitudes shaped by theology and culture (see below). There were also pragmatic reasons. These were years of consolidation as the initial missionary families settled, learned the language, built relationships in the community, and identified opportunities. The focus on education emerged out of a series of negotiations as the BIM balanced its self-perceived priority on evangelism with requests for schools from local Quechua Indian communities and the devolution of this responsibility by the Bolivian Government.Footnote 26 These were sole-charge schools, reminiscent of many contemporary rural schools in early-twentieth-century New Zealand and Australia. As the BIM became more financially stable it responded to a larger array of opportunities. By 1916, secondary schools were established to cater for children moving up through the school system, indicating continuity of students over time. From 1917 the workforce was complemented by growing numbers of American missionaries, boosting the ability to develop greater capacity. The schools eventually became more professional and structurally complex, requiring the BIM to look to the local community for assistance. Trained teachers increasingly led mixed teams of missionaries and Bolivian people.Footnote 27
Table 1 Indigenous/Bolivian Teachers, Bolivian Indian Mission, 1916–32Footnote 28
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Between 1916 and 1932, the BIM co-opted or employed at least thirty-two people of Bolivian origin in its schools (table 1), primarily involved with day or evening schools. However, as the next section will indicate, Bolivian teachers like Eufrasia [surname unknown] and Maria Garvizu filled multiple roles, and a categorical designation for every individual remains elusive. The BIM initially tapped into educated people in San Pedro and environs; Erasmo Zanabria was the local schoolmaster and both Napolean Burgoa and Emiliano Tapia were lawyers.Footnote 29 As the mission aged and people converted from Roman Catholicism to evangelical Protestant Christianity, so the complement of local workers slowly grew. Some of the names appeared only once or with little comment, while others intermittently appeared and with more detail. Some, like Maximilian Rivero, appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in the context of mission teaching and evangelistic work while others, like Florencio Hermoso, were consistently visible. Others seemed to fade from view, although this did not mean that they ceased their involvement. Tragically the lives of two teachers were cut short. Eloi Alcalá died from a knife attack in the nearby town of Arque in 1924, and Demetria Gallo died from an unspecified illness in Cochabamba in 1926 while nursing her brother.Footnote 30
Over this early period support for the mission from local families was important, possibly accentuated by the relatively small scale of operations. These families provided a core of stable, faithful and committed personnel. In particular, the Tapia and Garçia families loomed large in the BIM narrative. Emiliano (with his wife Lucinda) and Francisco Tapia, along with another brother Liborio, came from a local landowning farming family. They had previously converted from Roman Catholicism in the town of Sucre, were baptised in 1912, and became clearly respected as “workers” and “friends.”Footnote 31 Their involvement was both long term and multifaceted. In 1922, Emiliano was busy writing an apologetic book about Christianity and science for students, as well as preaching and opening his home for evangelistic activities.Footnote 32 Both Francisco and Liborio fulfilled various and sustained teaching or preaching roles. In many ways the Tapia family acted as patrons for the mission, providing both facilities for a school on their property at Sacana and legal advice.Footnote 33 The Garçia family emerged in the early 1920s but less is known of their background. Eighteen-year old son Augustin(e), a teacher of Quechua boys in Torotoro, was described as “a boy . . . who was converted a little over a year ago, and [who] has lived a consistent Christian life.”Footnote 34 Four other family members were cited in the context of both assistant and sole-charge teaching roles.Footnote 35 In 1927 the father, Avelino Garçia, Snr, was put in charge of a BIM station at Torotoro as a “native evangelist,” where one of his responsibilities was to run a small school.Footnote 36 Along with Francisco Tapia, this was the first instance of Bolivians formally employed as missionaries in their own right.
Bolivian teachers’ identity by name and gender is relatively clear. There were slightly more males (just over half) than females employed in this period. The men were mostly younger, ranging in age from late teens to mid-twenties, and taught both boys and girls. Young women became more numerous with school expansion and they also taught both sexes. In the 1920s the BIM employed more single women missionaries, especially from America. Both missionary and Bolivian women may have been perceived in the same gendered light, that is, that women primarily should work as teachers or nurses. Most of the schools were led by missionary women principals. At the same time, the case of Senora Bethsabé Espinoza—a married Colombian woman with a daughter and who was employed as the principal teacher of the “San Pedro Native Town Schools” in 1927—indicates that gender roles, while circumscribed, remained fluid.Footnote 37
The ethnicity of this cohort is less obvious. In principle, the BIM’s focus was on the indigenous Quechua and Aymara peoples of Andean Bolivia. In reality it worked amongst a mixture of town-based Spanish and cholo or Creole (mixed Spanish and indigenous descent) peoples as well as the more rural or village-based indigenous populations. While Quechua children were a greater teaching focus by the later 1920s, it remains unclear whether or not the teachers involved were also Quechua. The Spanish ethnicity of the Tapia family is reasonably clear from their economic status as landowners, and corroborated by the stated complications of patronage and mutual obligations between them and their tenant farmers, which precluded the brothers from teaching in the school on their own property. For instance, Margarita Allan told the Field Council in 1928 that “the difficulties which the Tapia brothers encountered in regard to teaching the [Sacana] school themselves on their own property was that as ‘patrones’ the indians [sic] did not consider that they should fulfil their obligations towards those who gave them the Gospel. It was also understood from Liborio Tapia that the Indians were ‘arrenderos’ [tenants paying rent with labour obligations] and that the school could be held the whole year round every morning . . . but not in the afternoons.”Footnote 38 It is reasonable to assume that the teaching cohort as a whole reflected the mixed nature of the surrounding population, so that indigenous teachers may have been among their number.
Another fair assumption is that given names in these mission-derived sources were either Christianised or Hispanic, and thus not a reliable guide to the named person’s ethnic identity. Remaining clues hinge upon the use of the words “native” and “Quechua” in extant texts. Angel Medina, Deterlina Murillo, Demetria Gallo, Mauro Valdivieso, and Florencio Hermoso were referred to as “native believers,” but from the context this could mean either Quechua or cholo origins.Footnote 39 “Native” was a problematic word in BIM usage, however, as it was used as a blanket term for anyone of Bolivian origin involved with or employed by the mission. More specifically, the following individuals were referred to in the context of teaching in the Quechua language or translating for a teacher: Deterlina Murillo, Augustin(e) Garçia), Avelino Garçia, Jnr, Demetria Gallo, and Avelino Garçia, Snr.Footnote 40 Those texts, however, are complicated by at least one reference to Laborio Tapia also conducting a Sunday school in the Quechua language, indicating that some Bolivians were bilingual regardless of ethnicity.Footnote 41 In the missionary texts, ethnicity was either assumed or was deemed to be a less important marker of identity. One teacher, Maximilian Rivero, may have had a Quechua background, but in a lengthy biographical article he was simply referred to as “one of four sons of a drunken Bolivian father” who was himself “a good Catholic.” The text describes and emphasises Maximilian Rivero’s changed life after his conversion to Protestant Christianity.Footnote 42 His example indicates that in the missionary discourse, identity markers other than ethnicity (and especially the demonstrably epistemological and metaphysical change from one identity to another) were perhaps deemed to be more significant. Therefore, this remains an open question; important but not able to be categorically defined within the parameters of the existing English-language sources.
What Did They Do?
An account of BIM work in 1916 noted that “Secondary school classes have been started for the youths who have finished their studies in the primary school” and that “Mr Burrows started and directs these classes, and has to assist him in the teaching . . . Emiliano Tapia, Napolean Burgoa (a young lawyer) and Erasmo Zanabria (the government schoolmaster).”Footnote 43 These three men clearly contributed to BIM teaching alongside their other occupations. Nevertheless, the tone of this statement is representative of the entire discourse. Bolivian teachers, as with other local employees, were often cast in a secondary role, commonly referred to as “workers,” “helpers,” or “assistants,” with little further detail. This was typified by a reference to the two “native Christians, a young man and a young woman, both baptized,” who assisted in the Torotoro schools in 1927.Footnote 44
There are a few glimpses of activity. Bolivian workers were instrumental in enabling the BIM to broaden its educational projects. Two young men, for example, took over or began schools specifically for Quechua children: Moisés Requenta in Sacana (1930) and Rufino Berramende in Tatuco (1931).Footnote 45 An exceptional example was Maximilian Rivero’s own description of his involvement in the San Pedro Boys’ School. Through 1919 he taught them a mixture of “arithmetic, reading, writing, hygiene, and drawing” as well as doing Bible studies on “the Life of Christ.” Ongoing classes with twelve boys in 1920 indicated that basic literacy and numeracy skills were his core pedagogical concerns. At the same time his greater hope was that God would increase the numbers and that “some, at least, will become disciples of my Lord.” The article was accompanied by a photograph of Maximilian centrally placed “with his Indian boys” around him.Footnote 46 More typical was the description of Angel Medina as a “helper” to Mr Powlison at Toracari where, between them they expected “to be able to handle the school, as well as the meetings for preaching the Gospel and the medical work.”Footnote 47 Angel later became the sole teacher of a school of twenty-eight boys in a small converted house.Footnote 48 Demetria Gallo, from a home likened to a “drunken madhouse,” combined weekday personal study with assisting “in the Girls’ School in San Pedro” and teaching Sunday school to Quechua children.Footnote 49 Deterlina Murillo came to San Pedro as a seventeen-year-old convert, first attending school herself and then accompanying two missionary teachers to begin a school in the town of Torotoro in 1921. There she also taught Quechua girls in Sunday school. By 1924 she was back as an assistant teacher in San Pedro.Footnote 50 Such movements, both geographical and occupational, were replicated by many teachers.
Two further observations can be made. First, within their designation as “native workers,” these teachers also had to juggle a number of other responsibilities; as did each of the missionaries. It was typical for the men to be simultaneously school teachers, Sunday school leaders and teachers, district visitors or evangelists, public preachers, and translators/interpreters. Once school finished for the summer holidays, they also commonly accompanied missionaries on wide-ranging trips to scope out new stations, evangelise, or sell literature. The case of Florencio Hermoso was typical. He juggled term-time school teaching at Acacio (where he was “Senior Assistant Teacher” by 1932)Footnote 51 with evening meetings and other itinerant evangelistic work. During the holidays he helped to investigate further possibilities in the region. In 1928 he opened an “Indian” school at Sacana, and by 1932 he was noted along with his wife Maria as the “chief instrument in the opening up of the Indian field about Acacio to the gospel.”Footnote 52 Single women like Deterlina and Demetria clearly balanced teaching with domestic duties for missionary families, as well as teaching in Sunday schools. This crossover between day schools, Sunday schools and other responsibilities indicated that Bolivians’ teaching roles were complex and demanding.
Second, there is little information about Bolivian teachers’ training or qualifications. There still needs to be a wider discussion around indigenous missionary teacher education, but it is evident that local circumstances and attitudes played a key role in explaining differences between missionary sites.Footnote 54 In the Bolivian context the extant information is ambiguous at best. Perhaps this is not surprising given the low national rates of trained Bolivian teachers. The first normal school (for teacher training) was only established in 1909, and by 1943 barely 30 percent of Bolivian teachers had gained an education higher than primary school.Footnote 54 The earliest teachers in BIM schools, like the Tapia brothers, were trusted and readily given the role of teachers because they were educated and knowledgeable, not because they had teaching qualifications or experience. The early missionaries themselves were not teachers, bar one New Zealand woman—Annie Cresswell—who was a qualified and experienced primary school teacher. Furthermore, they brought with them experiences of the pupil-teacher model—emphasising on-the-job training for non-qualified teenagers—inherited from the British context and still prevalent in colonial settings in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 55 Teacher-training colleges and normal schools in colonial New Zealand were only introduced after the 1877 Education Act, which initiated a genuinely national education system, but one that was still in transition during the early decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 56 Amongst missionary recruits, professionally trained teachers were more commonplace after World War I, reflecting the greater professionalisation of Western education by this stage, and there was an expectation that others would receive proper retrospective training while on furlough in their home countries.Footnote 57 In-service school teacher training was in place in the 1920s for BIM missionary teachers, with a more rigorous and sustained approach to understanding effective pedagogy.Footnote 58 Although not explicitly clear, Bolivian teachers were probably involved in this training, with their greater numbers by the 1920s making this a more pressing necessity. The only explicit references were to new assistant teachers being trained at Acacio, to replace others dismissed because they had “taken part in the feasts” and had “drunk liquor, and a note about the provision of study textbooks for Corina Terrazas and the Garçia sisters.”Footnote 59
One further element needs to be noted here; by the mid-1920s there was a sense that some male missionaries and Bolivian workers viewed being a teacher as a transitional or preparatory step towards becoming a preacher, pastor, or missionary. To this end two developments became clear. On the one hand training was important but it was geared towards acquiring biblical-doctrinal knowledge, not professional skills. In the 1920s there existed a “Native Workers’ Training Course,” which operated like an internship catering for individuals and supervised by on-site missionaries.Footnote 60 Although formal institutional training for Bolivian employees was deemed important, how it was activated changed over time. Liborio and Francisco Tapia each studied at the Los Angeles Bible Institute (United States of America) from 1922–23 and Francisco’s progression was from teacher to pastor.Footnote 61 Other Bolivians trod a pathway to bible institutes in Costa Rica and Argentina.Footnote 62 From 1934, the BIM moved towards establishing its own Bible Institute at Cochabamba, partly to make training more financially viable for Bolivians but also to control the extent to which they might acquire “expensive and foreign habits.”Footnote 63
Discussion
In reviewing pre-2000 historiography of Pacific missions and ChristianityFootnote 64 Doug Munro and Andrew Thornley note that Pacific Islander pastors appear often in missionary magazines and books, but that they are “generally accorded an elliptical mention in missionary archival [emphasis theirs] sources. . . . In total there is a fair bit, but there is not much systematically on individuals.” Where individuals do appear, they are often “atypical.” Even so, they argue, this information “is usually only sufficient for the pastors in question to be used as a concrete example of this or that within a group portrait.”Footnote 65 This is the very same dilemma faced when we try to write biographically about Bolivian teachers within the BIM or, indeed, about indigenous teachers and mission workers per se.Footnote 66 What emerges is essentially a group portrait that is limited by source parameters and a lack of deep biographical detail, contextually bounded, and “tainted”Footnote 67 both by European mediation and by missionary idiosyncrasies or predilections.
The Bolivian teachers of the BIM represented here were actors on a stage set against a complex backdrop of cultural, theological, political, and socio-economic factors. The central Andean highlands, towns like San Pedro and Torotoro, and haciendas like Sacana collectively constituted a complicated site or “contact zone.”Footnote 68 Within this site the establishment of mission schools, and how local teachers were viewed, was influenced by a combination of: missionaries’ colonial background (influenced by a high view of education and experiences of the pupil-teacher training model); evangelical priorities; revived Protestant interest in South America and anti-Roman Catholic sentiments; Bolivian political change; and indigenous communities’ sustained and effective agitation for education.Footnote 69 In particular, the BIM’s educational project coincided with an early-twentieth-century Bolivian re-articulation of what contemporaries referred to as the “Indian problem” (notably indigenous underdevelopment and socio-economic deprivation) by a succession of Liberal governments. Through this lens, so-called “ignorance and savagery” were not seen as inherently racial or cultural problems, but rather were viewed as the result of “historical developments in which the Indians had emerged as perpetual victims of abuse, injustice, and exploitation by rural elites . . . captives in a prison of ignorance and backwardness perpetuated by hacendados [large land owners], corregidores [local administrators], and curas [church clergy].”Footnote 70 In this re-articulation, education emerged as an important focus for reform, because the welfare of the indigenous population was linked to national stability and progress. While educational reform was more theoretical than real up to the 1940s, foreign groups like the BIM were supported in their important role as educators of indigenous children and as employers of local teachers.
This context was important, but the fact remains that what we know of the BIM’s Bolivian teachers is largely dictated by the extant sources and their one-sided nature. While this article has argued that we can learn valuable things from these sources, and that they give Bolivian people a named presence, nevertheless it is not difficult to reiterate a rhetorical question raised by Munro and Thornley for the Pacific context: “Whose life was it anyway when the only documented sources were the records of an unequal relationship between [subject] and [missionaries]?”Footnote 71 Thus the discussion here is as much about the sources as it is about the subjects residing within those sources. By way of conclusion, I suggest that there is value in thinking about three related issues: missionary discourse, the resulting status of Bolivian teachers, and evidence for a Bolivian voice.
In the first place, Bolivian teachers’ lives and experiences were mediated and communicated through a Protestant lens increasingly coloured by conservative evangelicalism and strident anti-Roman Catholicism. In this period a creeping conservatism across Protestant missions resulted in a more constricted theological worldview, a greater re-alignment of evangelical Christianity with the culture of Anglo-American societies, and a widening theological gap between churches and organisations both at home and in mission contexts.Footnote 72 The resulting discourse, for groups like the BIM, was demonstrably doctrinal and biblical, irrespective of other priorities like social change and economic amelioration. It amounted to a deliberate combative and defensive positioning within wider evangelical Protestantism. Inevitably this filtered through into BIM perspectives on the situation of Bolivian indigenous peoples and the factors impinging on their place in society. From the beginning, George Allan had a clear sense that the “Indian problem” had profound historical roots in Spanish colonisation, and was then manifested, for example, in the Quechua Indians being treated “little better than animals” and living in “conditions of slavery … much like that of the Irish tenants at one time.”Footnote 73 At the same time, in this discourse, socio-political oppression had underlying spiritual dimensions. At heart, BIM missionaries perceived themselves as battling “satanic hosts that will, without any doubt, try to hold the field in the interests of oppression, ignorance, idolatry, and all that is contrary to Christ and His salvation and dominion.”Footnote 74 Social problems like drunkenness and gambling thus were symptomatic of this underlying state of spiritual and political oppression. Social justice and spiritual regeneration went hand in hand.
If, however, the blame was to be spread amongst hacendados, corregidores, and curas then the BIMs bias was towards the last—that is, the Roman Catholic Church. “Concerning schools,” wrote Allan in 1910, “the question comes to us, Do friends at home grasp the nature of our work here, and the need for schools as a means of obtaining an entrance among the Indians? Direct evangelisation, when no visible tie or mutual help unites us with the people, is uphill work in a Roman Catholic country…. Where Rome is the adversary with whom we grapple, we must have Scripture in the language of the people, and they must be taught to read it.”Footnote 75 Roman Catholicism was commonly linked in BIM thinking, over many years, to indigenous illiteracy, exploitation, idolatry, and ignorance; thus education became an important emancipatory weapon and means of enlightenment.Footnote 76
Second, then, this discourse inevitably shaped BIM attitudes towards local people, including Bolivian teachers, and helps to explain their ambiguous and negotiated position within both the textual sources and the mission. Christian conversion (albeit from Roman Catholic to Protestant variants of Christianity) was fundamental to personal and societal change. Even so, suspicions remained amongst missionaries over the degree to which converted people had really escaped the perceived perniciousness of their religious and social milieu—in particular, the degree to which they could shake off Roman Catholic influences. In turn this gave rise to a conflicted perspective that rendered indigenous peoples in the unenviable state of being both problem and potential. This was typified in an appeal for supporters to pray for a Bolivian evangelist, prefaced by the observation that “[i]t sometimes happens that we write of a Bolivian worker, praising him or her, only to find that by the time the paper reaches our readers the worker in question has put us to shame by some unworthy step.”Footnote 77 There were two stated instances of teachers being dismissed for transgressions of the social mores expected of evangelical Christians,Footnote 78 and there were at least two individuals—Maximilian Rivero and Mauro Valdivieso—with whom the BIM had an uneven relationship.Footnote 79 Much of what we read was positive, generous, and hopeful in tone, but there was also a subtext of distrust. In mission rhetoric, local people were highly regarded for their contributions, their skills of language and inter-cultural negotiation, and their clearly strategic roles as teachers, evangelists, and, ultimately, pastor-missionaries. Yet at the same time there was the sense that it would take time for each converted individual to fully prove the depth of their conversion. Perhaps disappointment gave rise to sustained caution that was underlain by a persistent seam of distrust.
Over the longer term this discourse may also explain the somewhat conflicted status held by Bolivian teachers within the mission. This was by no means limited to the Bolivian setting. As the articles in this issue indicate, the status of indigenous teachers and workers within nineteenth- and twentieth-century Protestant and Roman Catholic missions was vexed across a number of geographical and cultural contexts. Certainly the demonstrably unequal status between missionary and worker was a product of Western attitudes, values, and expectations. However, as studies in the Pacific and Polynesian contexts indicate, this underlying structure was complicated or nuanced further by geography, historical timing, and the ways that power relations variously shifted between missionaries/colonisers and indigenous peoples.Footnote 80 In other words, context was important. In the Bolivian case I do think that there is a good case for arguing that the deep antipathy for Roman Catholicism in BIM ethos and attitudes, and the perceived impact of Roman Catholicism on Bolivian Protestant converts’ ability to genuinely live a new lifestyle is also a key reason for the uneven relationships that resulted between workers and missionaries.
These complexities and ambiguities played out in different ways for Bolivian teachers employed by the BIM. For instance, in the regularly published lists of missionaries, the first mention of Bolivian employees—Augustin(e) and Matilde Garçia—did not occur until 1932; and Bolivians did not appear in photographs of the annual or biennial field conferences throughout this period.Footnote 81 Throughout the period, all Bolivian workers were classified as “workers” (that is employees), but never as members of the BIM. The possibility of membership was raised with the Field Council at one stage but was rejected on somewhat ambiguous terms. Allan thought that being both an employee and a member created too much confusion, and cited one individual’s case that bore that out in his mind.Footnote 82 While the text suggests that this was an issue of governance or employment conditions, there was a hint of caution about putting local people and missionaries on an equal footing. At the same time, employee status did guarantee proper working conditions, with salaries increasingly matched to uniform graduated-pay scales and salary increases based on merit, where economic circumstances allowed.Footnote 83 Even so, idealism and reality sat side by side. For instance, the BIM moved in the late 1920s to establish self-sustaining churches and schools, with financial support for Bolivian employees to come from a mixture of local people and tuition fees rather than from foreign funds.Footnote 84 This was theologically-driven (aiming for self-supporting and self-sustaining indigenous ministries), but was also prompted by international exchange problems during the Depression. Those problems quickly led to the suspension of this policy.Footnote 85 They also led to both missionaries and Bolivians receiving a smaller salary than usual, but with one key difference; Bolivian employees were to receive one-third the salary paid to missionaries.Footnote 86 The differences remained.
The third and final observation, however, is that both the missionary discourse and these resulting differentials were not the whole story. At a fundamental level names, details and photographs of Bolivian BIM teachers give them a clear, sustained, and important presence in the historical record. This presence is one indication that they were truly valued and well-regarded by BIM missionaries. There were also cases—especially where local workers were harassed, exploited, and even imprisoned by local officials—in which the BIM quickly became involved in advocacy and practical support.Footnote 87 The voices of Bolivian teachers were also be discerned, albeit infrequently, suggesting that they had their own opinions and perspectives and the ability to express these in public. One hint of that is in reports by Avelino Garçia, Snr, of his work in the Quechua village of Tambo Kasa. Alongside the imperatives of preaching and school teaching, Garçia also noted that he had “sought to protect the Indians from abuse and attacks against their individual liberty and their right of property [provided by the Bolivian Constitution]” as well as “making the Indians understand the errors of the Roman Church.Footnote 88 This expressed opinion was obviously acceptable to the BIM, given its wide circulation in published form, but also indicated that Bolivian employees could both have and voice publicly independent perspectives on their own work and institutional involvement.
The other hint of a Bolivian voice can be discerned by reading the field minutes against the grain, which enables us to see that individuals had some freedom to promote self-interest or to question policy and decision-making. One case is that of Mauro Valdivieso, a teacher in the San Pedro area who was seemingly well-regarded, but whose relationship with the BIM was inconsistent. In the light of his request to the council for a salary rise in 1928, members considered that his “spirit was not satisfactory and that his attitude towards the Mission was lacking in gratitude and courtesy.” Later, in 1931, he was nearly “put out” of the San Pedro church for unspecified “behaviour encouraging strife and disharmony.”Footnote 89 The 1928 incident suggests a mixture of promotional self-interest, mixed motives for teaching and ministry study, and a perceived freedom to speak his mind. It probably led to his withdrawal from both teaching and training. Yet a series of ongoing public and private interactions between Mauro and the council throughout 1929 further highlighted his self-perceived sense of entitlement (to money he thought was owed to him) and of the right to be heard, and the willingness by members to allow him this access.Footnote 90 He subsequently failed in his attempt at financial redress. What is significant, however, was the physical dialogue sustained between Mauro and the council, and the lengths to which the council went to fully and properly address the issue to the satisfaction of both parties. An ongoing relationship of sorts between the two continued into the 1930s.
This final discussion clearly indicates that it is possible to do more to gain a clearer sense of Bolivian teachers and other employees’ voices in the onward progression of the BIM through the 1930s and beyond. While their undeniable presence was mediated through other lenses, their voices are still heard through the fuzz of colonial-missionary sources and perspectives. This article marks a beginning to the process of better perceiving that voice and of situating these teachers within a wider ambit of colonial and missionary expansion. To fine-tune how we might hear those voices more clearly there are other methodological options and precedents from other contexts. This is indicated, for example, by a set of studies on colonial New Zealand that, when brought together, serve to triangulate the sources in order to differentiate various representations of Māori teachers in New Zealand’s state-run “Native Schools” system between the 1860s and 1960s. One method uses official written sources and the other a mixture of oral history and written indigenous sources.Footnote 91 Together these reveal a much finer-grained set of historical narratives than can be gained from one source type only. This in turn highlights the complex experience of both Māori teachers and their students which varies according to locality, iwi (tribe), community, and personality. Therefore, in the Bolivian context oral history emerges as a critically important entry point for hearing and understanding indigenous voices from the post-1940 period, when the mission moved more demonstrably towards indigenous church status and because there are still people alive who experienced and remember that period. Even so, this discussion has at least begun to excavate the presence and voices of Bolivian teachers within the archives of European expansion, to dust them off to reveal their identities and complexities, and to tease out their complex relationships within the matrix of missionary educational culture and practice in which they were inevitably embedded.