Perhaps the only criticism that can be made of the collection of essays that constitute La ambivalente historia del indigenismo is that it is not longer; that is, that the reader cannot immerse himself or herself further in the fascinating historical and political dynamics that these articles and the collection as a whole showcase. And this is hardly the fault of the authors or of the editors, for they have clearly had page limitations and topic restrictions to negotiate. Nevertheless, and given the enormity of the subject, the book gives a valuable oversight of institutional indigenismo after the mid-twentieth century as well as its origins at the intersection of hemispheric politics and policies that sought to manage indigeneity and indigenous peoples. As such, and beyond its value for the study of indigenismo, the collection participates in a growing body of scholarship that is concerned with comparing cultural policies and institutions across the Americas.

The six chapters that compose the book focus, as the title announces, on the crucial period after 1940, when indigenismo became more wholly of a piece with national political procedures in several Latin American countries. The authors write in full awareness of the significance of this particular historical juncture globally and what it meant in the national, regional and local contexts of Latin America. No longer the tentative and half-hearted measures that were taken up as official state versions of indigenismo from the late nineteenth century and especially the early twentieth, the forms that arise in the Cold War period are characterised by their marriage to institutional entities and thus also to the goals of crafting modern Latin American nation-states. Several of the authors explicitly and appropriately mark the difference between the practices of this period and the more radical forms of indigenismo that, in the absence of viable concretisation within the state, arose at the beginning of the twentieth century. A capital example is José Carlos Mariátegui's revolutionary indigenismo.

The authors are Laura Giraudo, Juan Martín-Sánchez, Abigail Adams, Osmar Gonzales, Alexander Dawson and Stephen Lewis, all specialists and authorities on different manifestations of indigenismo in the continent. Primarily, the collection covers a variety of cases in the designated period, from the Primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano (First Inter-American Inidigenist Congress) held in Patzcuaró in 1940 to the troubled implementation of indigenista policies in Chiapas 30 years later. It focuses on the cases of Guatemala, Peru and Mexico. In the case of the latter two countries, the pieces seek to characterise the dynamics surrounding institutional indigenismo's management of resources that were brought to bear on the social and political standing of indigenous peoples, as well as to provide extensive evidence, textual and case study-focused, concerning the specific instances involved. This also holds for the Guatemalan case, although given the quite different trajectory of institutional indigenismo in that national context, the texts involved tend to outline the peculiarly ineffectual and at best problematic role of indigenismo there. All six chapters share an interest in mapping out how indigenismo emerged as a professional field, or as one of the editors and authors terms it, as one that was ‘casi profesional’. Furthermore, the book offers a valuable, stated interest in understanding indigenismo as a transnational object of study, and several of the articles include a comparative dimension, whether explicitly as in the case of Giraudo and Dawson's contributions, or through a contextualisation within the defining influence of applied anthropology as practised in the North. As is well known, this methodology had a formative effect on the study of indigenous cultures in Latin America, and so too was deeply impactful in the creation of government policies used to address the region's ‘indigenous problem’.

The collection provides a much-needed investigation into the institutionalisation of indigenismo after 1940. While some works – in fact, many by these same authors –have begun to address this history in other publications, it remains shocking that in some instances, such as that of the Instituto Indigenista Peruano (Peruvian Indigenist Institute), very little work has been done on the policies, history and impact of such bodies. The essays presented here, then, in the variety of regions that they cover, offer a major corrective to this absence. We can only hope that more and similarly interested work will follow.