Eduardo Kingman and Blanca Muratorio seek to capture what it was like to live and work in Quito during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a goal of ‘constructing narratives that provide us with alternative readings of the city and of its social spaces’ (p. 11). They maintain that examining Quito during the process of modernisation helps us to better understand how urbanisation and postcolonialism intersected. Rather than result in democracy and inclusion, the authors find that modernisation mingled with tradition in ways that both challenged and reinforced class, race and gender hierarchies. The strength of this book is in its recognition of fluid categories, examining the coexistence of capitalism and the popular (moral) economy, the connections between city and countryside, and the tensions between agency and hierarchy. The resulting book is a thought-provoking and nostalgic exploration of daily life in Quito that uses both anthropological and historical methods in order to capture patterns of life and meaning even as they fade from practice and memory.

Kingman's opening essay provides an overview of trade and street life in Quito that examines how daily life, ritual events and trade both complicated and reinforced race and class hierarchies. For example, while Catholic processions were meant to be ‘official theatre’ that reinforced hierarchies, Carnival and workers’ festivals often broke, or even reversed, hierarchies and rules. Urban trade was just as complex: although union officials tended to reinforce order (answering to city authorities and keeping members in line), popular markets were colourful and unruly. Authorities had trouble enforcing laws that were supposed to govern trade, particularly with female peddlers who often refused to register their businesses. Kingman identifies the urban marketplace as a domain of ‘alternative capitalism’, which even the emergent welfare state and sanitation institutions of the twentieth century could not fully tame.

Muratorio's essays focus on various forms of visual and material culture. First, she examines the role of cajoneras – women who sold ragdolls, toys and trinkets from elaborate chests of drawers in the covered passageways around the city's main plazas. Although city officials often accused cajoneras of corrupting female domestic servants by luring them into life on the street, cajoneras viewed their work as a means of both securing a livelihood and improving their status. Despite elite disdain, cajoneras made a good living and passed down their businesses to daughters and granddaughters, at least until globalisation put them in competition with cheaply manufactured toys and trinkets. Muratorio's essay captures the cajoneras’ entrepreneurial spirit and contributions to popular culture at a moment when they are disappearing, their trinkets now generating mainly nostalgia among Quito's residents.

In her next essay, Muratorio turns her focus to Tigua paintings, indigenous art painted on animal skins that are readily available in tourist markets in and around Quito. Muratorio takes issue with those who classify Tigua paintings as primitive art, since that serves mainly to reinforce stereotypes of backwards indigenous peoples, unaffected by modernisation. She asserts that the paintings are instead part of a larger popular and artistic culture in which subordinate groups present their own views of culture and create alternative histories. Since they first appeared in the 1970s, Tigua paintings have provided income that has helped indigenous families maintain their culture, and they also provide a venue through which indigenous painters can present their own views of religion, daily life and history. Muratorio's examination of the paintings and their production provides examples of how indigenous peoples have both adapted to and resisted forces of modernisation and acculturation.

Kingman's essay on masons’ unions shifts focus from artistic and material culture to labour history. Rather than rely on official documentation alone, this essay centres around the interviews Kingman conducted with two particular masons, don Nicolás Pichucho and don Segundo Jacho. These oral histories allow Kingman to explore the lived experiences and views of the workers themselves. He learns that masons tended to view class privilege in Quito as discrimination; they were particularly concerned with the lack of respect given to masons for, literally, building the city. At times, workers’ memories could even turn historical periodisation upside down. Whereas historians generally refer to the 1930s as a difficult period due to political upheaval and economic strains, don Nico and don Segundo recalled it as a time of relative economic stability. Their recollections remind us to be wary of assuming cross-class consensus based on the views of the upper and middle classes.

Muratorio's last essay changes focus to middle-class culture through her examination of memorial portraits of children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of the portraits she analyses are of dead children pictured as if still living, a genre of art influenced by grief portraits commissioned by bourgeois parents in the United States. These images of deceased children were recreated from their parents’ memories, sometimes years after their deaths. Other paintings depicted miracles in which children were saved from death, or of young women about to enter convent life (a social death in which they withdrew from the world). Muratorio uses these paintings to explore the boundaries between memory, fiction and history. While it is an interesting and well-developed essay, it does not fit well with the central themes of the volume because it lacks the interactions between dominant and popular cultures evident in other essays.

The essays in this book not only invite the reader to consider life in Quito from the perspective of the majority, but they reveal how complex, and sometimes contradictory, forces shaped urban life and processes of modernization. Their purpose is not just to add nuance to historical or anthropological studies of Quito, but to re-imagine the official history and heritage of the city. This book will be of interest to both Ecuadorianists and scholars of Latin American urban history. It would be a particularly powerful tool to use with graduate students, in order to generate discussion of scholarly methods and the importance of examining history and culture from subaltern as well as dominant perspectives.