Karem Roitman has written an insightful and powerful indictment of the ideology of mestizaje in Ecuador. She is not the first to have done this, of course, but the particular contribution of her book is that it focuses on elites – their perceptions and identifications – and on how mestizaje works among the vast majority of the Ecuadorian population according to the 2001 census – that is, those who identify as mestizos. Other studies, of Ecuador and elsewhere in Latin America, have tended to focus on how regimes and ideologies of mestizaje affect racial and ethnic minorities, usually indigenous and black groups. It does bear noting, however, that some other work, most of it not cited by Roitman, while perhaps focusing on such groups, has encompassed non-black and non-indigenous categories. France Winddance Twine's Racism in a Racial Democracy (1998) is one example among the Brazilianist literature steadfastly ignored by Roitman; Marta Casaus Arzú's Guatemala: linaje y racismo (1992) is absent, as is Charles Hale's Más que un indio (2006). Other work on Colombia could also be cited.

Some of the picture Roitman paints will be familiar to students of race in Latin America: the tendency to avoid explicit reference to racial categories in public discourse, while such categories emerge more in the domestic and private domain; the preference for talking about inequality and disadvantage in terms of class, not race or ethnicity; the predilection for blaming the victims, who have an ‘inferiority complex’ that prevents them from competing and makes them into the purveyors of racism against their own peers; and the constant recourse to tropes of sameness and equality (of opportunity at least), underwritten by claims to a common mestizo heritage. All these elements have been noted in the literature. The power of Roitman's book lies in the clarity with which she shows how racial hierarchy and racialised identifications pervade the discourse of elites in Guayaquil and Quito, often in remarkably frank and revealing narratives. These are found above all in the central two chapters of the book, where she describes and analyses her interviews with these people, who include some of the crème de la crème of Ecuadorean society.

The inclusion of the port of Guayaquil is also very interesting and works as a counterpoint to highland Quito. The Pacific coastal city – which reminded me of Colombia's Barranquilla – is seen by its elites as open and tolerant. They admit they are of racially mixed heritage themselves and they see the so-called montubios (local, rural people) as having a good proportion of black and indigenous ancestry, yet they deny the label of mestizo either for themselves or for the city's population (although in chapter 3, Roitman shows that, in the 2001 census, over 71 per cent of the city population self-identified as mestizo, with nearly 19 per cent calling themselves white). It seems that mestizo is associated for these elites with the highlands and thus with a form of indigenousness that they see as alien to their region. I wonder if there is here a dimension of coast–highland regional opposition in Ecuador's history that Roitman does not fully bring out.

In Quito the elites willingly identify as mestizo, although Roitman argues that this is a relatively recently learned identification and suggests, rather in passing, that it is a response to indigenous mobilisations which are perceived as a threat. In both cities there is a clear process of differentiation within the mestizo category, with elites acutely aware of who is more white and who more cholo or longo, both terms used in shifting and contextual fashion to identify people who are seen as tainted by lower-class origins, often signalled by indigenous phenotype – those who are moving up in the world but retain their ‘vulgarity’. Roitman's discussion of these categories is excellent, and she pinpoints the interweaving of biology and culture that is so typical of racial discourse in general and especially in Latin America. There an indio can become a mestizo through cultural transformation (suggesting to some that ‘indio’ is an ‘ethnic’ not a ‘racial’ category), but somehow the transformation is never enough, and perceptions of phenotype, ancestry and ‘blood’ remain crucial.

Roitman's focus on elites who seem to identify themselves as white or certainly at the lighter end of the mestizo spectrum is a strength, but it also leads her towards a view of mestizaje that is slightly at odds with some of the more recent scholarship on this theme. She, along with many other Latin Americanists, is rightly sceptical of approaches that celebrate hybridity as liberating. Yet in her insistence on mestizaje as a mere ideological façade for exclusionary practices, she tends to ignore or, worse, misrepresent other arguments which see mestizaje as having multiple meanings, particularly if one widens the field of vision beyond the elites. I would argue that mestizaje achieves its commonsensical, everyday, affective hegemony partly by representing different realities of racial inclusion and exclusion at the same time, or at different times for the same people. Roitman's assertion that mestizaje ‘forces complicity’ (p. 58) hardly does justice to the complexities of the ideas and processes at stake, either in mestizaje or more generally in hegemony. The statistical fact that 77 per cent of the population identified as mestizo in the 2001 census can and should be subjected to critiques of the kind that Roitman applies, which question what is really being captured in this figure. But it still suggests that mestizo is something more than a forced identification and that the inclusive claims of the category must be more than a simple chimera, even as they also refract and blur the undoubted processes of exclusion that are their integral counterpart.

The book is unfortunately marred a little by poor copy-editing (including missing references in the bibliography), but Roitman has produced a very useful addition to the existing literature on mestizaje in Latin America.