Most lines of work explaining the emergence of indigenous political activism in the Ecuadorian highlands have not paid enough explicit attention to indigenous political subjectivity, even when stressing the emergence of a new political actor. In this paper, it is argued that indígenas in Otavalo, during the 1970s and 1980, were able to challenge the construction of social identification, articulating an indigenous critique of mestizo personhood. This paper claims that this critique was essential not only to the transformation of the way in which indígenas see themselves, vis-à-vis others, but also to the formation of an indigenous intelligentsia that later will provide the ideologies shaping the national indigenous movement. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.