Citizenship is at the core of democracy. It is also at the core of indigenous mobilization in Latin America and beyond. For if Indians are contesting the terms of citizenship, they are also contesting their unequal experiences with it. But what is citizenship? Who gets to be a citizen? And how is citizenship experienced? These are basic questions. Yet they have been largely sidelined in studies of third wave democracies. Indeed, democratization studies for the most part have tended to assume that the category, boundaries, and experiences of citizenship are given and preconstituted. While there have been notable exceptions, most recent studies have tended to focus on the institutions that define democracy rather than the people who take part and the terms by which they do so.

It is no longer possible to ignore citizenship (and its links to ethnicity) in democratization studies. For with the turn to competitive electoral regimes, we have witnessed the (re)emergence of groups committed to redefining citizenship. These are not “simply” struggles to expand the suffrage to excluded groups. Rather, the new struggles have increasingly assumed an ethnonational cast and have taken two broad forms.