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The week of riots of February 27, 1989 in Caracas, called the Caracazo, is a major tipping point in contemporary Venezuelan history. As a historical event full of meanings, the Caracazo was constructed in public memory as the downfall of the social compromise of the Fourth Republic (1958-1999), and then, in official Chavista memory, as the uprising of a revolutionary people. This article is based on the life stories of inhabitants of the working-class neighborhoods of Caracas, the barrios, gathered in the early 2010s. What emerges from these individual memories of urban chaos is a resistance to its understanding within the framework of grand political narratives, including the Chavist official narrative. The individual accounts allow us to listen to the lived anomie of the upset city and to the attempts at a moral construction of popular improvisations to deal with it.