ABSTRACT
How do historically excluded groups realise goals for substantive experiences of full citizenship? Scholarly debates focus on disjunctures between the promises of citizenship, and the violence and misrecognition that persist in practice. In this context, can everyday spaces generate the vision and organisation to challenge that disjuncture? This chapter reflects on the imaginative prefiguration of action for justice and inclusion in an Andean district, where Indigenous residents mobilised against exploitation and discrimination, and elaborated utopian visions for inclusive and equitable society and governance. In Cotacachi district in northern Ecuador, a citizen utopia emerged around a vision for a plural participation and anti-racism. The county took important strides to dismantle colonial modern exclusion for racialised, rural, and dispersed populations. With its unique local ordinary citizenship, Cotacachi originated from utopian currents that put buen vivir (‘living in plenitude’) into the country’s 2008 Constitution yet the district took this further than national policy and politics. Threading through Cotacachi’s utopian praxis to remake citizenship was evidence of how citizenship utopias can be born and defended against powerful forces ranged against them. What were once utopian dreams in the 1970s institutionalised forms of solidarity and social legitimacy.
