Arriving in the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa, Calvin professor and Spanish department chair Dwight TenHuisen hoped his letter of introduction, credentials, and prior communications would secure access for him and his two student researchers to the city's extensive historical archives. However, TenHuisen quickly realized that in order to carry out their research, they’d have to both strengthen past partnerships and cultivate new relationships to span academic and religious divides.

Building relationships, addressing the past

TenHuisen and the student researchers—junior Spanish, German, and linguistics major Joshua Maher and senior biology and Spanish major Hannah Jasperse—had come to Arequipa seeking to better understand the role that the Catholic Augustinian order played in colonial Peru. While the Augustinian archive in the city was lost during Peru’s war of independence, three other Catholic orders, the Franciscans, Dominicans, and the Mercedarians, still operate archives and libraries in Arequipa.

Working with the Universidad Católica de San Pablo office of international relations and two San Pablo colonial historians, TenHuisen spent several weeks in talks with the Dominicans and Mercedarians over accessing their archives.

“As a white north American Calvinist working on colonial issues, I have to deal with the colonial and post-colonial context,” TenHuisen said. “The only way to do this research successfully is to develop relationships with people on the ground and show them that I’m not a threat.”

TenHuisen explained that due to past cases of document theft and misrepresentation by foreign researchers, the archives of Arequipa are cautious about whom they provide access to: “If you’re a Mercedarian in the 21st century, and some American comes in and reads your documents and then writes a paper saying, ‘Oh, these horrible Mercedarians, can you believe they did this,’ what have you gained by opening your archives?”

During these weeks, Jasperse and Maher explored other collections, including the 12,000-volume research collection of the German-American historian Sabine MacCormack housed at San Pablo and several archives in the city of Cusco to the north.

Discovery through collaboration

Through the persistent efforts of the San Pablo historians and their many connections with archivists and the Church hierarchy, the team was eventually granted access to the Dominican library and the Archiepiscopal Archive of Arequipa, and assembled a roster of over a thousand possible documents for future research.

“I gained a lot of respect for the research process this summer—I realized that it requires hours and hours of investigation just to find a substantive gap in existing research,” said Maher. “We had to search for documents and letters without knowing if they actually existed in the first place.”

“My favorite part of the project was entering into the archives and reading documents from the 16th century, written by hand in Spanish,” said Jasperse, “I was struck every time by the fact that some individual wrote those words hundreds of years ago, and astounded that I was permitted to touch and handle them.”

“I had not anticipated the importance of connections and relationships with other researchers and directors of libraries, archives, and academic institutions in conducting our investigation,” Jasperse added. “This ability to work together was incredible to me and also humbling as I realized that on our own, our project would have had far less success.”

TenHuisen noted that his collaboration with students this summer was itself unexpected: “I don’t often get students who can read sixteenth century texts and can understand them—it’s really rare—and this summer I had the unique opportunity to get both funds aimed to develop student researchers and two students who actually could do the research.

“I want to express my thanks to the Nagel Institute, the McGregor Undergraduate Research Program, and the Calvin Research Fellows Program for making this possible,” he added.

Exploring history to understand the present

From research into colonial literature by the Augustinians and the other religious orders of colonial Peru, TenHuisen hopes to better understand how colonizers evangelized and saw non-Christians, as well as how they discussed evangelization. “I’m interested in how our religious ideology affects how we see the religious other—in the 21st century, how does a Christian interact with someone of a different faith, and how does that affect how we see them as human beings?”

“This research made me contemplate my own faith due to the topic’s proximity to the Catholic church and the process of evangelization,” said Jasperse. “My long-term goal is to become a full-time missionary, and the more I learn about the mission field, the more aware I am of the tensions of respecting cultures when introducing the life-saving news of the Gospel—these tensions are the same as those faced centuries ago.”