Most often, sustainability is associated with questions pertaining to the natural environment or, in the urban context, with ways to mitigate the problems associated with rapid demographic growth and its associated troubles. But how might the concept of sustainability help us frame questions of racial, ethnic and cultural belonging in today’s rapidly expanding urban centers in the Global South? How is the articulation of ethnic and cultural identities amongst the growing urban indigenous population in Mexico a matter of sustainability? This talk will examine the experiences and mobilizations of Wixárika indigenous youth who are living, studying, and working in Mexico’s western cities of Guadalajara and Tepic. My ethnographic and archival research explores state and popular perceptions of racial belonging in these two cities and the challenges these imaginaries face. Specifically, this talk will discuss the ways that Wixárika university students and young professionals negotiate these perceptions, increasingly through forms of activism that assert the rights of indigenous people to be heterogeneous urban citizens. These acts of activism and visibility on university campuses, government buildings and private offices manifest a push away from observing racial alterity in cities as a relation of “negative difference” to one of “positive heterogeneity.”