ABSTRACT Costumbrista literature has been repeatedly analysed as a strategy as well as an expression of the process of nation formation in nineteenth-century Latin America. However, it is also a powerful lens for exploring and interpreting the urban visions of literate elites during the turbulent period of liberal reforms and expansion of a capitalist market economy. Largely dismissed as picturesque and inconsequential, in its apparent simplicity, Costumbrismo casts light on how liberal and conservative elites attempted to capture the daily effects of the market economy, and express their anxieties about the increasing commodification of everyday life, the growing obsession with money, and the changes in their own experience of time. As I argue here, Costumbrista literature helped place the new economic order in the local imagination. But it was also a contested ground where writers shaped partisan distinctions and, in the process, established themselves as political elites.