In Latin America, rural communities have historically represented a challenge both for the nation-building process and for countries’ development strategies. How should the indigenous population be incorporated into the nation, while moderating the potentially destabilising tensions rooted in persistent ethno-cultural differences? And how can rural households become active contributors to economic development without triggering subversive forces that would threaten the stability of the national economy and its involvement in regional and global markets? To address these questions, since independence Latin American states have adopted a variety of strategies, underpinned by different, and sometimes opposite, visions of citizenship and development. These strategies have had concrete effects in redefining ethnic and class boundaries, shaping at the same time relationships between the state and social groups and among social groups themselves. Since the early twentieth century, citizenship and development regimes have followed somewhat cyclical patterns, oscillating between the dyadic forces of separation and assimilation, social inclusion and differentiation.

Why do some countries enact structural reforms to accommodate large-scale immigration while others maintain exclusionary policies? Why do some states expand migrant rights while others curtail them? Based largely on European and North American case studies, the dominant scholarship on immigration and citizenship has focused on three types of variables: culture, domestic political elites, and international norms. These works tend to assume that the countries in question have relatively open immigration policies to begin with and thus do not sufficiently explain patterns among so-called negative cases of immigration. Recent studies focusing on East Asia point us toward an important intervening variable: civil society. But the presence of civil society alone does not explain divergent immigrant incorporation patterns. Rather than assume that civil-society actors are unified in their goals, world views, or strategies, I introduce the concept of civic legacies to refer to the ideas, networks, and strategies applied in past struggles for democratic inclusion that differentially shape the direction of immigrant incorporation and the potential for structural reform.