Drawing from the contributions of anthropology, cultural studies, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis, Mary Weismantel analyzes the politics of race and sex in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. As she points out, her goals are to contribute to dismantling the myth that Latin America has achieved some kind of racial democracy, to show the continuing power of race in Andean societies, and to shed light on the sexual dimensions of racial oppression.

Weismantel presents readers with a beautifully assembled text that combines her own field experience during the years 1982–87, a review of the work previously done by social scientists in Latin America, and a quite liberal use of travelers’ accounts, visual records, and the literary works of the best-known or the more fashionable writers of this region. As she states, her claim to validity does not rest on her singular authority but on her ability to construct a credible intersubjective narrative (p. xxiv), which is inevitably partial and multiple.

To undertake this task she chooses two paradigmatic figures: the chola and the pishtaco. The first refers to a racial category—between Indian and white, to an actual character: the market woman, to a female image that epitomizes the national mestizo identity, and to a figure of the area’s indigenous movements. The pishtaco is a bogeyman, a fantasy figure common in Andean folklore, which evokes violence and fear. He typifies a kind of masculinity described as macho—violent, aggressive, and hyperphallic—that that is also associated with the sinister side of interracial and gender relations.

Through this unusual combination of an actual character and a fantasy figure, Weismantel seeks to express the contradictions of the Andean racial and gender system. The pishtaco summarizes the fear and abuse implicit in racial and sexual exchanges between Indians and whites. The chola represents a woman who breaks gender and racial boundaries. In that sense, the author proposes that the category chola reveals and even exacerbates racial conflicts.

Weismantel situates her analysis in the marketplace because, as she claims, it is the space where racial boundaries overflow, where whites, mestizos, and Indians interact. According to the author, the ambiguities of the chola, a market woman and a subordinated figure, express the gap between two forms of material exchange: the chimera of reciprocity represented by the Indian and the reality of unequal exchange embodied in the story of the pishtaco.

The author concludes the text by analyzing the ritual of the Mama Negra, the black mother, which she opposes to the pishtaco, the castrating father. The procession of the mama negra, a travestied version of the Virgin Mary, performs the inversion of the racial and gender order: focusing on a figure that breaks every social hierarchy in the Andes and, Weismantel likes to believe, announces a radical democracy that overturns sex and gender oppressions as well as those of race and class (p. 258.) The pishtaco, on his side, exemplifies an ideal of masculinity in Latin America identifying manhood with violence and castration.

Weismantel has made an enormous effort to integrate a wide array of sources to offer readers a thoughtful and solidly built panorama of racial and sex relations in the Andes. I have some reservations, however, regarding her method and her assumptions about Latin American culture and gender identities. First, it is one thing to accept that the ethnographer uses rhetorical tools to persuade the reader of the validity of his or her statements and quite another to treat ethnographic data and literary texts as if they were comparable pieces of evidence. As concerns Andean societies´ racial and sex systems, Weismantel’s analysis is still pervaded by dualism. Although criticizing the assumption that racial hierarchies are static, she re-creates an Indian culture untouched by asymmetry. For instance, Indian economic rationality is rooted on the notion of reciprocity, gender relations are balanced, and the notion of masculinity is centered on the good and caring father: the tayta. She goes on to propose that there are two conceptions of masculinity: the white and mestizo, associated with machismo, and the Indian, centered on fatherhood. In so doing, Weismantel reconstructs a lost paradise free of inequalities degraded by the Western conquest and reproduces the very well known, and already contested, identification of Latin American mestizos and white men with an abusive masculinity.