Who decides which stories about a city are remembered? How do interpretations of the past shape a city’s present and future? In this book, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos discusses notions of power and national identity by examining how nation-states negotiate the preservation of urban spaces and how a city interprets, resists, and consents to the functions and meanings that it has inherited and that it reinvents for itself. Looking at the Brazilian city of Ouro Preto, de Souza Santos applies fine-grained ethnography and historical analysis to discuss the limits of Brazil’s imagery of social harmony and participatory democracy amid continuous inequality.