This anthropological study of grassroots community leaders in Porto Alegre, Brazil's leftist hotspot, focuses on gender, politics, and regionalism during the early 2000s, when the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) was in power. The author explores the ways community leaders make sense of official notions of citizenship and how gender, politics, and regional identities shape these interpretations. Junge further examines the implications of leaders' deep ambivalence toward normative participation discourses for how we theorize and study participatory democracy, citizenship, and political subjectivity in Brazil and beyond.