For over a century after the Spanish-Creole agents founded the chaotic Province of Tucumán, on the far south fringe of the viceroyalty of Peru, the indigenous societies known as Diaguitas and Calchaquís succeeded in maintaining their political and territorial autonomy. The intermontane valleys today known as Calchaquí Valleys acted as a kind of black hole in which colonial hegemony dissolved and the power apparatus failed to effectively submit these Indian groups, despite their early formal incorporation as encomienda workers. Moreover, since it successfully maintained itself out of the reach of the colonial sphere, the Calchaquí Valley exercised a certain power of attraction for individuals breaking with the new order. The ability for incorporation and adoption that Diaguita societies showed throughout the period, fed in turn the permanent renewal of the methods of resistance. Besides blurring colonial authority, the cases studied herein drew a singular politically autonomous order that continuously reintroduced elements from both sides of an extremely porous border.