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This article explores the historical and political dynamics connecting identification, registration, and citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire. It focuses on rural communities displaced from Haute-Volta in the 1930s and settled by the French colonial government in “colonial villages” around Bouaflé. These populations held the ambiguous status of foreign immigrants until the 1990s, and still face difficulties in obtaining identity papers from the local administration. Although now legally recognized as citizens, they have thus continued to exist in a liminal status of legal and political exceptionalism. Since the end of the Ivorian crisis (2002-2011), the old issue of citizenship has been recast in terms of the “risk of statelessness” by the government and international organizations. The present article reconstructs the history of discrimination against these populations and their struggle for “papers.” It shows that neither the reform of civil registration nor the introduction of biometric identification has radically altered their documentary insecurity or overturned the old stereotypes that continue to structure notions of national belonging. “Autochthonous” populations still consider the citizenship of the “Voltaic villages” through the prism of historical memories of colonial governance. The article concludes by observing that new biometric technologies, although intended to depoliticize the issue of identification, do little to reduce the risk of statelessness and may even pave the way for its digital consolidation.