Traces changing economic ways and political participations in the Mexican capital from the era of late nineteenth liberalism and emerging informalities, into times of revolution after 1910, through the post-revolutionary turn to national capitalism and the construction of an authoritarian regime. With industrial boom after 1940, neither employment or resources proved sufficient to formal development in a rapidly expanding city, leading to barrio-based informal urbanization, as people built their own homes and new neighbourhoods—and turned to neighbourhood mobilizations to make demands and preserve limited gains. With globalization under NAFTA from 1990s, de-industrialization spread marginality while population continued to grow. The democratization of 2000 brought few gains to people facing marginal and informal lives in a city still the national capital, a pivot of power serving globalization, and the largest metropolitan region in the Americas.