This inter-disciplinary study, based on fieldwork, views the peasantry in the context of the historical experience of conquest and domination. Since the 1950s the community of Chilca has become more mobilized and confident, and increasingly affected by capitalism, urbanization, the Peruvian Revolution and agrarian reform. In Chilca, the cultural world of the Indian peasant remains important, but the marginality of the southern Andes within the Peruvian economy and the long-term decline of the agricultural sector have produced an agrarian condition which offers little real hope to the Indian peasant.