In the wake of the devastating Argentine economic crisis of 2001, Buenos Aires has undergone one of the largest real estate booms in the city’s history—a boom that is fundamentally reconfiguring the urban landscape. In the midst of a whirlwind of urban development, several middle-class neighborhood activist groups have emerged to contest the effects of the boom on the identity of their neighborhoods and city. One of these activist groups, Palermo Despierta, has begun a campaign in the Palermo district to prevent the construction of residential mega-towers - an icon of urban development since the crisis. This middle-class activism largely contradicts scholarship that pigeonholes middle-class urban dwellers as agents of “globalization-oriented urban development.” I argue that underlying the resistance is a desire to defend an historically imagined, national narrative of middle-class European identity inscribed in the urban space of Buenos Aires. In a nation and city recovering from crisis, porteños (Buenos Aires residents) are more willing than ever to contest the globalizing of their city in order to re-emplace national narratives that remain at the heart of their urban identity. This nascent activism is deeply paradoxical, however, as the narratives that animate Palermo Despierta operate on the basis of racial and class distinctions. Contrary to the claims of scholars like Saskia Sassen and Arjun Appadurai, I argue that Buenos Aires demonstrates that the process of deterritorialization has been accompanied by processes of middle-class reterritorialization in post-crisis Buenos Aires. I also offer a revision of the view that neoliberalism is a totalizing form of global hegemony. Post-crisis Buenos Aires illustrates that the global hegemony of neoliberalism is itself contested, resisted, and reworked by the national hegemony of middle-classness and Europeanness.  [Article]