In December of 1951, the Cornell Peru Project, created under an agreement signed by Cornell University and the government of Peru, undertook a systematic program of research and development in the depressed highland Indian hacienda of Vicos, located in the Callejón de Huaylas, an intermontane valley some 270 miles north of Lima. In subsequent years Project personnel, in co-operation with functionaries of the Peruvian government, carried out a comprehensive program of development that significantly transformed the economic, educational, medical, and political institutions of the community. This program has included the introduction of innovations in farming techniques, the construction of an educational system, the building of a medical facility, and the transfer of local political power into the hands of the Indians.

This paper considers some of the ways in which the activities of the Project have affected population structure and change in the community and, in turn, how some of these population changes have affected, and are likely to affect, the efforts of the Project in the development of the community.