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Faced with unresponsive and intimidating bureaucracies, citizens across particularly the global south regularly rely on intermediaries to gain access to public services. Focusing on how such brokers arrange access to health care in Indonesia, this essay discusses the impact of brokered state-citizen interaction on the character and experience of citizenship. On the basis of extensive fieldwork in both urban and rural Java we argue that brokers not only enable the realization of citizen rights, they also transform the experience and interpretation of these rights. Brokers ‘vernacularize’ citizenship, in the sense that citizenship comes to be experienced and interpreted not just in terms of a formal relationship with a national state, but also in terms of the character of personal relationships and attendant obligations that exist between citizens, brokers and power holders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]