My interest in Marrakesh began in 2004 when my spouse and I visited the city eager to immerse ourselves in the "tourist experience". During our stay, we had a first-hand encounter with money and power. I recall the Pizza Hut server who warned me, rather in solidarity, that the tourism police were rounding up faux-guides (unauthorized tour guides) because I was in the company of a white tourist. I also recall the five-star hotel guard who denied us entry on the pretext of our "improper" casual attire. It was during the same visit that I began to appreciate the subversive nature of Marrakeshi satire and the "tiny revolutions" -in the Orwellian sense- each Marrakeshi joke evokes. Marrakeshis console each other, in jest, that Marrakesh "will soon impose a travel visa on poor Moroccans" whenever confronted with class-mediated "Hogra" (contempt, oppression and injustice). This paper is a qualitative research project on the processes of urban restructuring operating in Marrakesh and their implications on the local population. It arranges in one analytic framework questions of (post)coloniality, ideology, heritage-commodification, subjectivity and counter-conduct in the shadow of global capitalism. I examine, on the one hand, the ways in which the political, economic and social shifts affect the power relations in the city and, on the other, the ways in which the city's residents interpret those shifts, receive/perceive the changes underway in their neighborhoods. I find that Marrakesh has become a "contested terrain" in which local residents attempt to modify or resist policies, discourses and practices favoring "attractiveness" over local priorities. The central state orchestrates the depopulation of the historic neighborhoods deemed essential for the city's branding; it then opens the field to the NGOs and the media to construct a marketable and consumable "patrimony," while private actors who invest in real estate and tourism benefit from favorable policies and sprawl into peripheral land. Against this backdrop, the forms of counter-conduct among Marrakeshis are far from being monolithic. Some civil society groups choose to internalize the modern governmental reason in their activism. Others adopt a language of empowerment very much in line with the market logic, while many simply appease the state to secure short-term benefits. As for those urban subjects who lack the capacity to assert their right to the city, they engage in various forms of collective, albeit fragmented, speech/action consisting of informality, rumor and humor as the preferred means of oppositional politics.