The author of this book, published under the aegis of the French Institute of Andean Studies, has a PhD in literature from the University of Michigan, but the study is delightfully free of the enforced vanities of contemporary scholasticism. There is no barrage of tenure-track footnotes, and the reader is spared serial deconstructionist enfilades. One warning, though: if you prefer your etymology free of proctological intrusions (or vice versa), avoid p. 106, where Foucault makes a solitary and entirely apposite appearance. This is an interdisciplinary work well beyond the mainstream sense of some petty larceny from a neighbouring social science. Soruco varies her expressive register for the paintings (Melchor María Mercado for the mid-nineteenth century), novels (Nataniel Aguirre for the nineteenth century, Armando Chirveches and Enrique Finot for the twentieth), photographs (principally the Cordero studio, 1900–1960s) and dramas (largely the work of Raúl Salmón, 1940–70) that provide the ‘textual’ core of a rich cultural history of creole depiction of the mestizo/cholo over the last 150 years. The author herself refers simply to her historical ‘register’, and, already armed with an abundance of literary and visual evidence, makes modest reference to statistical, journalistic or other documentary sources. So, even though we are given a compellingly concise depiction of late nineteenth-century property disputes through the Arteche mining case, the primary concern here is with politico-cultural power as deployed through projections of race. The outstanding quality of the book's argument is its demonstration of the shifts in elitist essentialism over time, and in this chronological calibration it possesses a firm historical sensibility. The theory that underpins this account is indeed worn lightly, but this is by no means an under-theorised work – Soruco has shown elsewhere that she quite enjoys a little taking of abstractionist vapours, and here the ideas of Benedict Anderson and Doris Sommer are most politely demonstrated not to work for the case of Bolivia. Equally, as a politically engaged intellectual, Soruco brings her analytical reach allusively forward beyond the revolution of 1952, through the katarismo of the 1980s, to the government of Evo Morales, which could be depicted in terms of the lexicons identified here as Indian-mestizo (as opposed to the mestizo-creole racial register adopted after the 1952 revolution, the creole-mestizo voice emerging in the 1930s from the Chaco War, and the unsteadily contested creole anti-mestizaje adopted after the liberal revolution of 1899).

At the heart of the study is the understanding that the emergence of a cholo culture from the mid-nineteenth century ‘has enabled the questioning and transformation of the colonialist republican state’ (p. 16). Yet the conundrum – evident over the long term and vividly illustrated in recent years – is that ‘lo cholo lives in constant transition … it is not a cultural bloc that competes as such for hegemony because it cannot project itself, reproduce itself in its children, or project an autonomous national discourse’ (p. 127); hence René Zavaleta's poignant remark, cited here (p. 137) with respect to 1952, that there is no impotence quite like that bestowed by victory. (Perhaps the most recent example of this would be the dispute over the highway through the TIPNIS reserve planned by the MAS, supported by the highland indigenous cocaleros who have ‘colonised’ the surrounding Chaparé, and resolutely opposed by the originarios of the area?)

Such ‘high politics’, though, are not an abiding concern of a book that is primarily about public power as articulated through private relations, particularly through gender relations, and most especially through the masculine vision of non-creole women. Indeed, this is really a study of cholas – how and why they have dressed themselves, how and why they appear under the male gaze. In the latter, they are sometimes not there at all (elites are not above being solipsistic), sometimes hyper-sexualised into disgrace, sometimes elevated to national motherhood. In her adroit treatment of the novels, Soruco guides through these permutations and their sub-declensions, bringing a tapestry of nuances to the bleakly familiar ‘debate’ between Alcides Arguedas (somatic pessimism in the style of Carlyle) and Franz Tamayo (Nietzschean expectation of the correct destination of coupling DNAs). She also writes with persuasive precision about costume, from the adoption of already antiquated Hispanic petticoats in the late nineteenth century, through shifts in millinery in the 1920s (here, I feel, some mention of the spread of motor vehicles would be merited), through to the era of the birlocha – ‘a woman who uses western clothing, but still bears the stigma of having been a chola’ (p. 104).

In fact, La ciudad de los cholos represents a telling empirical development of Zavaleta's disturbingly evanescent ‘lo nacional-popular’ in its combined sensitivity to the creole-elite (señorial) eye and to the material actuality of plebeian-elite culture. As is to be expected of any enterprising scholarly venture, there are a few unresolved questions of fact and judgement. Some are precise: I would not describe Uyuni – a railway junction with no pits of its own – as a ‘mining centre’. Others are more demanding: how is it, al fondo, that Raúl Salmón, the most popularly voiced mestizo literary figure of twentieth-century Bolivia, was in exile throughout the eminently ‘mestizo’ revolution of 1952? The issue of the book's title is of a different order since the study is both about La Paz and beyond it; nothing cholo prospers for long when disconnected from that city. Here, though, Soruco the stylist prevails. Her opening and closing passages are bravura portraits of paceño sights and sounds, creating a parallax fully fitting for a subject that hurries in and out of ‘otherness’, rather like una mujer de pollera on her brisk way to market. Fully illustrated and handsomely produced, this excellent work of scholarship deserves a wide readership in and beyond Bolivia.