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Through their actions and discourse, poor people throughout Latin America tell us that the peasantry is alive, vigorous, and anxious to struggle against the massive transformations unleashed by several decades of capitalist expansion and production intensification in the countryside. While classical political economists and Marxists alike imagined capitalist development turning the peasantry extinct, their theories made it difficult to observe the viability of peasant models of development and the sustained appeal of the land in the context of industrial society. For contemporary rural social movements the land is a source of hope in a world led astray by capitalist excess. This special issue of Latin American Perspectives examines, root and branch, the rise and prospects of some of these newer peasant movements in Latin America.