The memories which evoke pre-Hispanic times are clearly visible in Mexico City to an attentive eye: in the capital’s street names, metro station symbols, bills and coins designs, names of parks, districts, and neighborhoods. The sheer number of names, objects, and references become so familiar to the capital’s residents that they go unnoticed. Yet they continue to shape the daily urban landscape as symbolic and material “marks of the Mesoamerican past.” Here, I would like to pause and reflect on what we have normalized as Mexico’s “glorious past” by analyzing the narrative use of that history in a category such as the Pueblo Originario, indigenous communities. These memory processes, which call for an official definition of the city’s pueblos originarios, creates a clash between old and new representations of the metropolis, as well as old and new relationships with power, and of course, new roles in urbanization. How can we categorize the pueblo originario in the urban space? Who uses it, and for what purpose? How does it relate to other categories? How is it used in the official discourse? How do the pueblos themselves use it?