That Other America

People in the United States have a tendency to monopolize the term “Americans,” forgetting that there is a continent to the south which also is jealous of its rights to the continental name. There is another America; there are other Americans, and around this text the author has written a volume which seeks to present the Latin American world ethnologically, politically, and spiritually. Dr. Mackay has used the felicitous symbolism of Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe to interpret the chief difference between this America and the other, which has its source in spirit and type of the founders of the two continents: the Spanish conquistadores, representing both the idealism of Quixote and the materialism of Sancho Panza, and the Puritans, embodying the hardihood and desire for personal liberty of Crusoe.

In an illuminating chapter on the smoking craters of revolution in Latin America, Dr. Mackay has interpreted the critical situation in Mexico and the new revolt of youth in Peru known as the Apra movement. Coincident with this spirit of change he finds a new seeking after spiritual truths. The figure of Christ exerts an increasing fascination a young Spanish communist wrote some time ago: “I have Karl Marx in my head and Jesus Christ in my heart.” The volume closes with a comprehensive survey of the new Evangelical community coming into existence in Latin America, and with a strong challenge to Christian action to meet this yearning for a new faith, “not with a luminous idea or a universal ethical imperative, but with a person who is altogether lovely, strong and true.