The history of the Andean region is permeated by violence of conquest, a violence that resonates through contemporary relationships of profound social, economic, and political asymmetry in the nation-states of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Although scholars of the Andean region have analyzed colonial and post-colonial structures of power, they have tended to emphasize “ethnicity” and “class” to the exclusion of “race.” In Cholas and Pishtacos, Weismantel brilliantly demonstrates the intertwining of racial and sexual discourses in the Andes. Drawing evidence from a broad range of popular and scholarly material, she integrates archival documents, folklore, festivals, classic works by novelist José María Arguedas and photographer Martin Chambi, and descriptions of the people and events from her long ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuador. As she notes, each of these genres “demands it own form of interpretation, and offers a different kind of truth” (p. xxiv). In weaving together these distinctive genres, Weismantel creates a powerful intertextual narrative that illuminates the complex discourses naturalizing economic inequality and grounding social hierarchies in the Andes and throughout the Americas.