Struggles of Voice is not the first work to provide a systematic comparison of indigenous movements in Ecuador and Bolivia, and a number of analysts have turned their attention to the constitutional and legal differences between the two countries and the histories of their respective indigenous mobilisations. Lucero, certainly aware of this scholarship, does not offer yet another account of why Ecuador's indigenous peoples organised from the lowlands into a national federation while Bolivia's impetus came from the highlands and, despite fissiparous tendencies in the 1990s, resulted in the eventual election of a president. As the title of his book suggests, he is interested in the multiple voices that are behind these schematic differences, and he has heard rather a lot of them. Unlike many other scholars he has taken the time to talk to a large number of activists, some of them foot soldiers, others middle-ranking, others national leaders; he certainly has not focused exclusively on the main players. The reader is thus offered a very different perspective on how people in the Andes represent and mobilise themselves as indigenous subjects.

For those of us who are uneasy with the facile assumption that indigenous movements can be understood simply as political representations of indigenous people, Lucero's work provides an important antidote. He most certainly does not take an indigenous identity as somehow given, or as having suffered a period of latency only to be awakened by indigenous politics, where ‘“real’ ethnic identities seemed simply to be awaiting the right conditions in order to emerge, almost geologically, through the cracks of shifting political formations' (p. 15). In his careful examination of a wide range of groups he shows how history, region, class and religion are critical elements in understanding how concerns came to be articulated in terms of specifically indigenous identities. In some cases one might even say the indigenous movement has formed the indigenous identity. This is not to say that indigenous people are cynically manipulated or shrewdly opportunistic, but rather that there are a series of dialogues between a wide range of people out of which an indigenous identity and movement can emerge. Lucero offers his readers a vision of pragmatic actors who are nevertheless embedded in historical social relations and who have a long history of being discriminated against for their cultural practices. This methodological framework allows him to have a critical appreciation of the political, historical and social contexts of indigenous mobilisation and identity without explaining them away and thus leaving us with political manoeuvrings and no cultural reference. In this one could say he marries an anthropological approach to culture – which sees it as dynamic, constructed, but also meaningful – to a more conventional political science approach to ethnicity and culture focusing on interest groups and articulations of power. For Lucero, ‘Indigenous movements in Ecuador and Bolivia are all genuine expressions of historical and political realities, yet they have been imagined and articulated in different ways’ (p. 111).

Consequently, Lucero could not afford to spend all his time in La Paz and Quito interviewing indigenous leaders from MAS and CONAIE (although he certainly did this as well); he travelled for months in the highland provinces as well as the lowlands, and provides, for example, some very illuminating studies of lesser-known groups such as the evangelical FEINE in Ecuador and CONAMAQ in Bolivia. The result is a book that has an ear for the multiplicity of voices which make up an indigenous movement that constantly pulls back from easy generalisation. At the same time Lucero's philosophical bent draws out for the reader the many implications such a study has for understanding the nature of political representation and identity formation. He tackles the thorny problem of representation in many different ways, although at root his question is twofold: who is the most representative (that is, who most authentically represents their ethnic group), and who speaks most authoritatively (that is, who has genuine political support)? In the arena of indigenous politics, cultural authenticity has a certain currency but it can produce ‘ghosts’ with little or no grassroots support. On the other hand, well-organised structures may find that they no longer articulate the needs of large groups if they become too institutionalised. The latter is possibly what accounts for the dramatic decline in the fortunes of CONAIE.

Although eschewing easy generalisations, Lucero nevertheless teases out some important differences from the Ecuadorean and Bolivian experiences. Whereas many have noted the historical (if not recent) success of CONAIE in Ecuador as a unifying organisation of the indigenous movement and the dominance in Bolivia of highland groups, Lucero's study goes far beyond an analysis of structural factors to account for these differences. He notes a strong current of indianismo in Bolivia, rooted in an anti-colonial struggle in the context of the strong corporatist structures present during the decades after the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 and with a strong utopian tint. Ecuadorean groups have a different history of struggle. In Ecuador, where lowlands groups are much more dominant than in Bolivia, they do not share a comparable colonial history, and much less do they hold memories of a strong and powerful pre-Columbian state. Bolivians, in contrast, not only invoke the Inkas but the pre-Inkaic civilisation of Tiwanaku; without such a strong ethnohistorical framework, Ecuadoreans have organised as nationalities. In Bolivia, geographical and social marginalisation lends itself to a more class-based identification where Indianism provides a powerful critique for ethnic and class discrimination – indeed, large proportions of the urban working class in Bolivia identified themselves as indigenous in the last census. Many of the issues facing indigenous people in Bolivia and Ecuador are different, so it is not surprising that their indigenous identity is differently expressed.

In many places Lucero writes with marvellous clarity, demonstrating a keen balance between philosophical enquiry and empirical foundation, and his writing is often nuanced and sophisticated. The book could have been much better edited, however, and there are places where there reader gets a distinct sense of déjà vu. Despite this, it remains a strong work which makes an important contribution not only to the study of Andean indigenous movements but also to the issues of how ethnic subjects are represented.