Abstract

Various colonial documents and studies from the last century report that the district of Arica, was a space of multi-ethnic cultural, where lived fishermen, farmers and colonists altiplánicos, who practiced a socio-cultural complementarity, economic and asymmetric relations with the indigenous lordships, the Inka and then with the Hispanic world. Therefore, this article discusses the cultural identities and tax differentiations that affected the populations of fishermen and farmers in the territory from an ethnohistorical perspective, which allow to reveal the continuity of the practices of asymmetric reciprocity, economic specialization and complementarity of the indigenous populations of the coasts and valleys of Arica between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.