“A sharp book, in which Héctor Cuevas Arenas faces the great challenge of capturing the identityprocesses and political culture of indigenous people from the Cauca River Valley in the second halfof the Colonial period. It achieves this by means of a deep archival research focusing on one region—currently southwestern Colombia—, where the languages and identifiers of ethnic groups were lostvery early in the mentioned period, while the category of ‘Indians’ had prevailed. Based on a rigorousexamination of a wide range of Colombian, Ecuadorian, and Spanish archival files, he constructsan elegant and convincing argument to reflect on the various meanings of this term in the period.In his fluid text, the author investigates the nature of local power in a heterogeneous region. Forthis purpose, he coined the notion of “tributary pact between the king and his indigenous vassals” andunveiled practices implied by this pact. Rich in descriptions and novel in the field of historiography,this contribution by Héctor Cuevas Arenas problematizes the category of ‘Indian’ in the legal andpolitical spheres of everyday life between the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 19th century