The main purpose of this book is to give a description of the Cholón language as represented in the Arte de la Lengua Cholona (ALC), a colonial grammar written in 1748 by a Franciscan friar, named Pedro de la Mata. The ALC is kept in the British Library in London. Nowadays, the Cholón language is probably extinct. It was spoken in North Peru in the valley of the Huallaga river. Cholón formed a small language family together with the neighbouring language Híbito. The description of eighteenth-century Cholón, the linguistic part of the book, is preceded by a description of secondary sources and of theories about genetic relations (chapter 1), by an ethnohistorical sketch (chapter 2), and by an analysis of the manuscript (chapter 3). The linguistic part starts with an analysis of the orthography used in the ALC and of the observations about certain sounds, in order to reconstruct a tentative sound system (chapter 4). Chapter 5 deals with morphonology. In this chapter attention is paid to syllable structure, to phenomena like vowel suppression and harmonization, and to stem-initial consonant changes. Nominal and verbal morphosyntax are discussed in chapters 6 and 7, respectively. Cholón is an agglutinative language. Besides nouns and verbs, which are the most important word categories, Cholón has a small class of adverbs (chapter 8) and interjections (chapter 9). In chapter 10 discourse markers, such as question and exclamation markers, are treated. Chapter 11 is dedicated to the negation. In chapter 12, a survey of the different subordinate clauses is given. The linguistic part ends with a lexicon.

Las contribuciones a este libro se centran en las estrategias y los metodos linguisticos interculturales usados por los misioneros coloniales de la America Latina. Su objetivo principal fue una traduccion eficiente de los conceptos cristianos a textos amerindios y sus contextos indigenas para que sus destinatarios nativos lograran una mejor comprension de la nueva religion y abandonaran la suya. Para esto, los misioneros linguistas aprendieron las lenguas autoctonas y el resultado fue la creacion de obras linguisticas (diccionarios y gramaticas) asi como tambien textos para la instruccion religiosa cristiana (doctrinas, sermones etc.). Asimismo tomaron en cuenta teorias de lexicografia y traduccion, y tambien recurrieron a generos textuales nativos y europeos. Los aportes aqui reunidos constituyen una mirada comparativa a traves de Latinoamerica dentro de un marco amplio de disciplinas (como son la historia, la sociolinguistica, la antropologia etc.), estudiando las lenguas nahuatl, tarasco, maya, quechua, tupi, guarani y chiquitano. Al analizar los diferentes acercamientos a la traduccion, los autores llegan a resultados matizados en cuanto a los metodos misioneros, como eran prestamos y traducciones palabra- por-palabra, pero sobre todo la (re-)creacion de nuevos terminos y expresiones en la lengua ajena, frecuentemente basados en lo que se suponia que eran conceptos semanticos y gramaticales nativos. Aparte de una aparente confusion de los indigenas, en los articulos se observa la integracion del cristianismo en las culturas nativas, en la mayoria de los casos en la forma de una 'nativizacion' de la religion europea.

Until recently, historians of the Christian missions in the New World have seen Missionaries either as saints and martyrs or as brutal disrupters and oppressors. Both the apologists and detractors of mission enterprise have concentrated solely on the missionaries, regarding the native populations either as childlike beneficiaries or as mutely suffering victims. With the growth of ethnohistory as a field of research, new research has sought to reconstruct the situations, the reactions, and the strategies of native groups, thereby seeing the native peoples of the Americas as active agents in their own history. In Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon, David Block describes the formation of a new society in the Moxos region of the Amazon Basin, in what is now northern, or lowland, Bolivia. This society began with the arrival of the Jesuits in the region. The mutual synthesis that became Jesuit mission culture followed, with Moxos Indian cultural survival and adaptation continuing after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. With the cataclysmic onset of the rubber boom, the entire region was plunged into a period of severe exploitation and conflict that persists to this day. Block’s nuanced treatment of the mission encounter—one extending over a large time period—permits a balanced understanding of the mission enterprise, native response, and the cultural synthesis that ensued.