This paper presents the contradictions of the concept of citizenship found in research conducted with users of a health unit in the East Zone of Sao Paulo and the resulting barriers to popular participation in the SUS. Data collection was organized into two meetings, discussing the concept of citizenship and popular participation with eight subjects outside the unit's management council. We used the focus group technique. As a result, there was a vagueness of meanings applied to the concept of citizenship. The subjects mentioned a number of limitations to the implementation of this concept, as State's law, the repression suffered by the people, the disbelief in representative democracy and voting as citizenship practices, and the question of equal rights in our society; and popular participation as a form of collective movement in search of solutions to community problems. Therefore, popular participation within the institutional spaces of the SUS with this concept of citizenship can lead users to leaving their demands unsolved by the State in the the management councils. Only with other forms of pressure and non-institutional mobilization one can have a more effective popular participation and problem-solving view of the concerns of the population and health activists, who struggle for a public health and quality.
citizenship; popular participation in health; Unified Health System