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Empowerment holds a special appeal for organizations and funders involved in rural development, but its meaning and long-term usefulness for target communities remain unresolved theoretically and inconsistent in practice. This article proposes that empowerment be rooted in the daily language and life experiences of target communities if it is to realize its potential significance as an ongoing, individual and shared process that reaches beyond the short-term, goal-oriented rubric of many development projects. Rural perceptions of empowerment are explored and a locally resonant language is adopted for participatory group discussions of community development, capacity-building, and human dignity in an indigenous community of Oaxaca, Mexico. Integrating local understandings of empowerment with ethnographic descriptions of local reality as seen by community residents, a set of dimensions and indicators …