In December 1841, voters in Sonsonate (El Salvador) elected Frenchman and long-time resident, Luis Bertrand Save, as their alcalde, or municipal judge, for 1842. The governor insisted that Save accept the office. However, Save convinced El Salvador's president that he should not serve since he was not a citizen of the country, citing French and Salvadoran laws to back up his argument. French law mattered because Save could lose his qualité de français, or “Frenchness,” by holding office in a foreign government, and Salvadoran laws limited office-holding to its own citizens. In 1843, Save was again elected alcalde and again protested because “the law requires for these positions that it is indispensable that the elected be a citizen of the country. While I am a vecino (for I live in Sonsonate), I am not a ciudadano (citizen), and as a foreigner, have neither a letter of naturalization, nor am I naturalized de facto.” That is, Save acknowledged the importance of local citizenship and accepted the status of a Sonsonate vecino, or community member, but pointed out that he lacked national membership because his domicile did not make a “foreigner” a citizen, and he lacked the institutional change of status, naturalization, to overcome that foreignness.

Early in 1817, in the tiny port of Rosario, a deeply troubled Comandante Tomás Bernal sat down at his desk to pen a confidential private letter to Supreme Director Juan Martín de Pueyrredón, head of the national government based in Buenos Aires. Nearly seven years after the May Revolution against Spain, the territory that would later become Argentina found itself buffeted by civil war. Bernal's region, the jurisdiction of the city of Santa Fe, just up the Paraná River from Buenos Aires, found itself enmeshed in the bitter conflict between the government in Buenos Aires, the former viceregal capital, and its principal rival, José Gervasio Artigas, leader of a federalist alliance based in the nearby Banda Oriental, modern Uruguay. Desperate to contain disputes between the national government and the recently created government of Santa Fe, Bernal counseled restraint. However, he knew that Buenos Aires and Santa Fe were on the brink of war. “For my part,” he wrote Pueyrredón:

In October, 1797, the indios principales of the Andean pueblo of Muñani appealed to the royal court in Cusco to depose their governor, or cacica, Doña María Teresa Choquehuanca. Not challenging hereditary Choquehuanca rule, they instead focused on María Teresa's incompetence and her sex, complaining of “the miseries that we have suffered with [her] inappropriate entry into the cacicazgo,” adding that “on account of her distinct sex she should by justice be deposed, because she is not worthy of so estimable an office.” That office was central to the indigenous politics of colonial Peru, the legal and administrative ordering of which placed most of the Indian population in relatively autonomous, land-owning “pueblos de indios” over which the cacique, responsible for collecting the crown's tribute and maintaining order, presided as something between a chief and a lord. As the village leaders in a parallel, popular tradition that reserved its authority for men, Muñani's principales asserted that this bastion of elite indigenous authority ought not be held by a woman. But they made clear that it sometimes was: María Teresa had governed Muñani for five years. Nor was she alone. Cacicas governed pueblos and ayllus throughout the Andes, and it was quite common for the husbands of cacical heiresses to rule in their names.

In May 2006, foreign-born workers, largely from Latin America, mobilized across the United States in response to calls from anti-immigrant groups for tougher federal policies against illegal immigrants. About 400,000 protested in Chicago, 300,000 in Los Angeles, and 75,000 in Denver. In fifty cities between Los Angeles and New York, workers organized walkouts, demonstrations, and rallies in an effort to show just how important they were to the smooth operation of the U.S. economy.