ABSTRACT In this article, we analyze a crisis that resulted when a vehicular road was illegally cut through a corner of southern Colombia's San Agustín Archaeological Park, a UNESCO‐designated World Heritage site, by a nearby reindigenizing Yanacona community and its neighboring campesino allies. In numerous meetings addressing the crisis, Yanacona leaders, performing on a transnational and cosmopolitan stage, have asserted and justified their position by creatively combining local and “authentic” discourses with significantly scaled‐up heritage, developmentalist, and environmentalist ones. Yanacona articulate and adapt their ethnicity to an evolving global reification of diversity as well as fashion a symbolics of citizenship that critiques modernity but cannot be called “traditional.”[ reindigenization, heritage, performativity, state–indigenous relations, politics of culture, cultural tourism, Colombia ]