This article explores ideas of citizenship in Latin America, arguing that this very western idea plays a key role in configuring and embedding the Occidental project in empirical reality and in academic theorizing. Drawing inspiration from ‘coloniality of power’ scholarship, it explores the way in which citizenship is conventionally configured and goes on to demonstrate the role of citizenship in the task of epistemological colonization in the case of Argentina. I discuss processes of coloniality/modernity, including the Conquest of the Desert, and assimilation initiatives during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the more recent phase of multiculturalism. I conclude by outlining a strategy for decolonial citizenship and advocate a shift in emphasis from (liberal) rights to dignity, and from (Occidental) universality to diversality.