Land Tenure and Planned Social Change: A Case from Vicos, Peru

Abstract

In 1952, Cornell University, in collaboration with the Instituto Indigenista Peruano, sublet, for a period of five years, an hacienda called Vicos, a Quechua-speaking community of about 2,000 inhabitants located in the highlands of northcentral Peru, for the purpose of conducting a research and development program on the modernization process. One of the principal developmental outcomes of this program to date has been a shift in the status of Vicos from a dependent hacienda community, controlled and administered largely from the outside, to an independent indigenous community, controlled and administered largely from within. Necessarily involved in this shift, of course, have been changes in many aspects of culture. But among the most striking of these have been fundamental alterations in the patterns of land tenure and work, some of the effects and implications of which I would like briefly to consider here.