Los Salesianos y la Amazonia

In 1875, the date of the first Salesian missionary expedition, the percentage of indigenous people in Latin America was still quite high, before the waves of immigrants completely changed the statistics. In the Andean region and Mesoamerica they still made a decisive contribution to agriculture, but they occupied the bottom rung of the social ladder: poor, exploited, victims of strong racism. But, for almost a century, the Salesians did not take care of them, but of a tiny minority, constituted by the so-called primitives or savages. We can try to find some explanations.