While ethnographers call for including temporal contexts in their studies, they do not closely consider how to accomplish this. Instead, they tend to treat the past as historical facts, collected by experts, and largely isolated from the understandings of their subjects. This study analyzes how residents being interviewed about their city invoked the past. As opposed to a past born from static historical sources, the past of interviewees was largely autobiographical, and it was actively performed through interactions that strategically critiqued or wistfully enhanced the present. These intimate, populist histories reflected and maintained community ideals and identities, and they defied elite, professional explanations, revealing conflicts between how researcher and researched define the world. Ethnographers and other researchers of the present should be sensitive to how their subjects construct the past, as well as their own representations of history and the dynamics of power underlying them.