Girls have the greatest disadvantage. Indigenous people are not idle. They are more likely to have a job than the general population. Even there, they earn but a third of the wages made by nonindigenous agricultural laborers. But if the head of a household is unemployed, that probability nearly triples.
Employment is more important than heritage.
But getting a reasonably well-paying job is strongly related to education. Increasing schooling to 16 years would decrease the poverty ratio for indigenous Latin Americans by more than half. Education can't do the whole job. If indigenous workers had the same education, experience, and health as their nonindigenous peers, half the difference in wages would remain. The explanation for this lies in part in culture and the quality of education and in part, of course, in discrimination.