Several Latin American countries have declared themselves —including Colombia— as multicultural nations. In the process they have restructured legal rights along lines of cultural distinction that have provided special rights to ethnic groups under new political constitutions. A crucial dimension of this legal change has been the sacralization of a particular conceptualization of indigeneity. In this article I focus on the processes that enable and limit ethnic belonging in Colombia, in order to understand the concept of indigeneity on which these ideas of ethnicity are based. I analyze the use of specific ideas of indigeneity in a territorial conflict in the Andes between Indigenous and Black communities, and also a Supreme Court ruling (Sentencia T-422/96) that discusses the rights of Afro-Colombians. https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X73