Mexico City’s sonidos típicos (“typical” sounds) play a paradoxical role in the lives of city dwellers: from street cries to the warble of barrel organs, these sounds are, for many, powerful indices of the city itself, yet so integrated into quotidian routines that they are rarely considered a subject worthy of conversation much less cultural patrimony. In this paper, I trace unofficial histories of sonidos típicos through the interpretations of street vendors. I analyze these accounts with two theoretical frames that arose in these conversations: convivencia (co-existence), both perception and performance of cultural intimacy, key to the day-to-day activities and popular representations of street vendors; and the barrio (neighborhood) concept, a literal and figurative setting for convivencia in which traditional lifeways are thought to endure in the face of gentrification. I put these accounts in conversation with a fragmented official history and ambivalent public policy—from noise abatement to cultural patrimony—in which the subject of sonidos típicos and, by proxy, the sound makers themselves have been intermittently stigmatized, coopted, and omitted. I will argue that within the shared experience of convivencia lies the potential for what Rolando Vázquez dubs decolonial aesthesis, the possibility of reconstituting a history that has been appropriated or erased altogether. By focusing on how sounds perform histories to construct the present, I forgo a linear genealogy of Mexico City’s sonidos típicos for an engagement with the past that is both intersubjective and multitemporal, joining myth and popular culture with the material realities of urban life.