Este artículo teoriza las relaciones entre la ciudadanía y el Estado ecuatoriano durante el primer año y medio de la pandemia COVID-19. Basado en una metodología cualitativa de entrevistas, las perspectivas de los participantes revelan relaciones contradictorias con el gobierno características de los estados de seguridad neoliberales, pero también de patrones (pos)coloniales persistentes de exclusión racista y clasista: por un lado, un sentido de abandono del Estado, particularmente en salud pública y educación; y por otro lado, la fuerza represiva del Estado en su uso de medidas militares y policiales y de estados de excepción. Proponemos el término estado disperso para referirnos a estas tendencias opuestas de simultánea ausencia y presencia estatal. Argumentamos que las respuestas ciudadanas a la ausencia estatal incluyen cierta aceptación del retorno de las funciones educativas y sanitarias a comunidades, hogares e individuos, provocando de todas maneras nuevas formas de adaptación y creatividad cultural. En cuanto a la presencia represiva del Estado, los participantes expresaron apoyo considerable hacia medidas estatales autoritarias, frecuentemente justificadas por discursos esencialistas sobre el carácter de la ciudadanía nacional.

The Dominican Republic retroactively stripped thousands of Dominico-Haitians of their Dominican citizenship yet managed to defuse international opprobrium over time. After a direct assault on people’s citizenship status in 2013 provoked the human rights community’s ire, the DR employed administrative obstructionism to maneuver around human rights activism and institutions. Policies instituted in 2014 appeared to offer a pathway for Dominico-Haitians to reinstate their citizenship yet were so administratively onerous that most of the affected population remains effectively stateless. Administrative obstructionism makes for an elusive target of attack because it unfolds across a series of decisions over time, transfers responsibility from a highly visible leader to dispersed and faceless bureaucrats, and is exceedingly difficult to monitor. Administrative obstructionism drags out proceedings, causing media attention to wither. Because international forces face special challenges in countering this strategy, a strong domestic opposition movement is necessary to sustain pressure on a rights-violating government.

In this article, I discuss São Paulo's legal apparatus in respect of environmental noise. I begin by situating my analysis within broader citizenship issues. I then focus on three debates on noise control in the city. The first two debates involve noise ordinances created in the 1990s and enforced by São Paulo's Programa de Silêncio Urbano (Urban Silence Programme, PSIU). The first revolves around the evangelical lawmakers’ attempts to exclude, minimize or hinder the impact of a noise ordinance on religious services. The second debate focuses on an ordinance that required bars without acoustic insulation to close at 1 am – a demand that faced strong opposition from businesses involved in the night-time economy. The third debate describes the recent attempt of a group of acoustic engineers to lobby the city administration for the systematic mapping of traffic noise. I contend that environmental noise is a fruitful point of entry to investigate how the state mediates universal equality and individual freedom, welfare principles and economic gain.

Abandonment has become a performative idiom in Andean Peru, where it retains its purchase despite the investments of the state. Local development is tied to the desire to be governed. In spite of prolonged state presence, the villages’ relationship to authorities is continuously and persistently figured as one of abandonment: villages are abandoned because someone is deliberately holding them in such unfortunate conditions. To figure abandonment in village politics is to draw on this idiom as an effective means of both communicating the historical experience of governance and putting forward morally grounded claims to local authorities. The idiom of abandonment is therefore both effective and affective as a critique of governance and a claim to citizenship.

This article examines the rhetoric and practice of a large social movement organised around low-income housing in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. Making explicit the relationship between housing and citizenship, the União de Movimentos de Moradia (Alliance of Housing Movements) articulates a ‘politics of rights’ with which it calls on the state to uphold the constitutional right to housing, and legitimates its high-profile occupations of abandoned buildings in the centre of the city. The article engages with James Holston's historical examination of homeowners’ struggles on the peripheries of São Paulo to assert themselves as rights-holders and to mobilise against threats of eviction. While Holston names these groups of residents ‘insurgent’ citizens for the way they have unsettled entrenched social inequalities, this article presents the concept of ‘transgressive’ citizenship to reflect the challenge the housing movement makes to the state as it uses text-based law to justify building occupations.

Against the backdrop of ethnic political mobilisation in Latin America, this article examines how, as Quetzaltenango's first Mayan mayor, Rigoberto Quemé Chay transformed two interrelated dimensions of citizenship: political culture and the politics of belonging. It analyses the way in which citizenship is constituted at three levels. The first is within Xel-jú as an indigenous political organisation whose practices contrast with ladino ways of doing politics. The second is in relation to internal divisions between the militant indigenous line and the intercultural group. The third is within Xel-jú as a city-centred, middle-class-oriented indigenous organisation rather than a rural, indigenous community organisation. This article argues that transformations in citizenship are limited by the political, economic and ethnic context, and that overlapping systems of repression still prevent the participation of marginalised groups in Quetzaltenango.

Beyond competitive elections, democratisation should include a transformation of the institutions of state and civil society into spaces that recognise the rights of citizens and allow for their participation. This study explores the question of how Mexican labour unions are transformed into institutions with a commitment to the rights and participation of women workers. Drawing on evidence from five unions, the paper shows that compared to their corporatist counterparts, unions with a ‘democratic ethos’ provide a context within which gender equity rights are more readily recognised. However, recognition of gender equity is primarily dependent on feminist activism and union leadership. The paper argues that women's efforts to transform their unions into spaces that reflect and advocate for gender equity rights are critical to strengthening democratic citizenship in Mexico.