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Mexico characteristically has extremely wide gaps in economic fortune. Poverty is concentrated in the rural regions and more especially so in the localities where the Indian population lives in the south. The rare funding organizations and public programmes which intervene in these territories generally consider that their principal mission is to favour the development of productive activities by means of access to loans. Nevertheless the Authors observed in these regions that the microfinance services are utilized more to meet strategies for reducing vulnerability than for logics of micro-enterprise. Based on the study of a small local institution of financial intermediation of the Sierra Norte de Puebla, the article aims to contribute to the understanding of the utilization and real impact of microfinance services in the situation that prevails in Mexico’s marginalized rural areas.