“The Poor and the Modern City: Recognition and Misrecognition of the Carpas Shows in Mexico City (1890-1930)” explores the spatial modernization of the Mexican capital via a study of the carpas as an indicator of social class. The author's stated goal is to show “how the local authorities utilized arguments to protect the urban space against those they imagined, and constructed, as the poor,” also stating that the new urban laws caused physical separation of social groups. In this sense, this essay analyses “how the elites and the people of the carpas internalized their respectively superior and subordinated class positions as if they were natural.” To prove her hypothesis, the author studies “the dialogues in legal documents between the state and citizens,” within a theoretical framework of ideas by Nancy Fraser (misrecognition), Aníbal Quijano (coloniality of power), and Ángel Rama (the Lettered City).