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The Free Church in the Andes. Scottish missionaries in the mountains of 20th century Peru. Edited by Iain Fraser Grigor. Pp. 335 incl. frontispiece, 4 ills and 1 map. Iain Fraser Grigor, 2020. £12.99. 978 1 5272 6768 8

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2022

Pedro Feitoza*
Affiliation:
Brazilian Centre of Analysis and Planning/São Paulo Research Foundation, Brazil
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Abstract

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2022

One of the most influential foreign Presbyterian educators and missionaries in modern Latin America, the long-time president of Princeton Theological Seminary John Alexander Mackay, came from the ranks of the Free Church of Scotland. The Church's missionary activities in the Peruvian Andes date from the early 1920s, and the main concerns of its missionaries concentrated on the evangelisation of the local population, the provision of basic education and, most notably, healthcare. Yet the encounters of these Highland-born Presbyterian missionaries with the indigenous populations of Peru have been hitherto ignored, and Iain Grigor has performed a valuable service to scholars interested in this history. Apart from an informative introduction and a short afterword, both written by the author, this volume consists of a collection of excerpts of reports and personal memoirs of Free Church Scottish missionaries in Peru. The excerpts take readers from J. A. Mackay's first expedition to South America in 1915 up to the 1980s, when missionaries became involved in social work in the areas of education, agriculture and health in the Peruvian countryside. Although this volume does not offer an interpretation of events and lacks some scholarly apparatus, such as footnotes, it is nevertheless a useful point of departure for researchers. The editor has located a wealth of reports, personal papers, booklets and a few academic works on Free Church missionaries in the Andes in English and Spanish and enumerates them at the end of the book, enabling scholars to find these sources easily. The excerpts offer interesting glimpses into the motivations, experiences and ordeals of these missionaries, shedding light on their encounters with the Peruvian population. These Scottish men and women – a good number of the protagonists of the book are nurses – were required by the nature of their enterprise to mediate between multiple languages, including English, Gaelic, Spanish and Quechua. Instead of opening mission stations in the largest cities of Peru, they settled the Andean region. For the earliest missionaries, access to the stations of Cajamarca and Moyobamba required long and dangerous travels on the back of mules across hilly areas. Modes of travel became faster and more sophisticated from the 1960s onwards, when missionaries acquired Land-Rovers and benefitted from regular air flights. Interestingly, as they travelled across the Andes, they found that the dramatic landscape of that mountainous area and the habits of the local population reminded them of their native Highlands (pp. 46–7, 54–5, 75, 117, 129–30, 267). The appendices at the end of the book introduce the main characters of the Free Church's missionary enterprise in Peru and provide additional information on other Protestant missionary endeavours in the area.