Members of a trilingual Matsigenka-Quechua-Spanish Southern Peru frontier community have started to create a 'community' as a field of action distinct from kin ties, and asamblea partaking enables to adopt a new political and moral subjectivity. Public discourse in another ‘indigenous community’ that has not yet adopted the ‘community’ concept, shows how code-switching permits leaders there to resort to both the private and public social authority modes.