This article forms part of a wider research project which aims to pick out in expressions of popular religion a cultural pool which can provide an alternative to the invasion of cultural models imported, by the media in particular, from the West. The historical content of religious practices, although frequently obli terated by unconsciousness and by successive alienations, nearly always constitutes a capital of popular restistance to attacks on the poor. What we are concerned with is how it is possible to move from simple resistance to active mobilization through the religious medium. The case of Peru, with the two examples considered (an Andean sanctuary and an Afro-Peruvian procession) can in all probability be applied to other cases of marginality in both the Third World and industrialized society. The advantage with Peru is that the social and cultural contradictions inherited from colo nial and republican history are very sharp, indeed caricatured.