alien values by the dominant culture of Andean countries. As Hamilton (2001) explained

in the case of Chanchalo, this community was protected from unequal gender relation

values because of the lack of developmental projects in its area.

 According Silvia Arrom (cited in Deere and Le6n 2002), the concept of the legal

inferiority of women in Latin America was implemented during colonial times, and

combined restriction and protection (Deere and Le6n 2002). Until only a few decades

ago, legal codes kept married women in a state of powerlessness, the same status

assigned to minors and the insane. The system of gender relations prescribed the

seclusion of women in the private sphere while men were assigned to the public, which

was a kind of work division: women were assigned to the household work, and males to

outside work. The first is characterized as being unpaid, invisible, and underestimated

while the latter is paid, visible and socially valued (Nufio G6mez 1999). But the

acculturation process is most visible in urban societies.

 According to these views, it could be said that unequal gender relations are part of a

process of acculturation of traditional and indigenous communities through contact with

colonization by western society and more specifically through their contact with capitalist

relations of production (Babb 1980). Deere and Le6n (2002) confirm these ideas,

commenting that Andean gender relations were traditionally immersed in a dynamic of

complementarity. But these relations went through a transformation affected by the

expression of hierarchy, based on Christian principles.

 Alderete (1992) asserts that women in the indigenous movement are aware of the

ideological distortions that colonization has caused. And they consider it necessary to

recover traditional culture in order to restore the power that women enjoyed in traditional