Based on ecclesiastical primary sources, this paper proposes a sequence of four historical stages of pastoral practice in the Prelature of Ayaviri, an important diocese in the southern Andes of Peru. The determinate phases in a period of almost fifty years are: 1) traditional-conservative (1959-1969); 2) indigenous-cultural (1970-1974); 3) politicalliberationist (1975-1992); and 4) political-democratizing (1993-2005). This analysis points out important changes in pastoral efforts and their implications for the Church’s work in religious (sacramental, liturgical, catechismal or popular religious practices) and social-political terms.

Since the beginning of its republican life, the Latin American peoples have made strenuous efforts to position themselves among those who bear the label of modern and developed. The repeated failures of these attempts were associated with deep questioning about the possibility and convenience of assuming progress and development projects, since the cultural characteristics of this part of the continent were very different from the original cultural contexts of said projects. Since then, at different times of acute social crisis in the region, heated debates have arisen around the cultural difficulties of local peoples in assuming as their own the processes of progress and development that Western modernization brought with it. In the midst of these controversies, polarized theoretical and pragmatic positions have emerged that decoded the relationship between modernization, development an...