While Indigenous/mestizo distinction in Latin Americanist anthropology has been mainly thought of as a cultural and/or socioeconomic demarcation, I argue that a conceptualization in terms of race offers some valuable insights. Starting from a soc- cer championship in the Otavalo region of Ecuador, I show how otavaleño Indigenous people’s historical and current experiences of racialization have shaped the crite- ria that they consider relevant to identification practices, and I illustrate how they build on these to act to some advantage. Building on the assemblage of what I call phenotypization—an extended notion of phenotype—and genealogy, otavaleños cre- ate spaces of identification control, striving to maintain the Indigenous/mestizo divide and a sense of belonging upon which they rely for economic activities. Favoring the notion of race, this study lays the groundwork for a Latin Americanist anthro- pology that considers Indigenous people as part of the same subaltern category as Afro-descendants.