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I examine how affect and feelings, long consider the domain of individual interiority and psychology, in fact directly impact the everyday life and political economy of cities. What do individuals’ affective worlds tell us about multi-scale experiences of race, gender, and sexuality in urban America? What kinds of emotional work do embodied practices of learning race and expressing adequate gender/sexual norms require? How does becoming a transnational racial and gendered subject in the U.S. impact one’s affective world and perspectives on the emotional subjectivities of others? I approach these questions by drawing from ethnographic materials gathered from fieldwork conducted in two neighborhoods –one Brazilian and one Puerto Rican- in the predominantly African American city of Newark, NJ, between 2001 and 2008. I argue that Latin American and Latino populations in urban areas of the U.S. navigate unfamiliar racial situations through the development of a quotidian emotional epistemology; that is, through the deployment of a set of gendered rules and assumptions about affect and its adequate expression, their interpretations of how others feel or should feel, and the creation or performance of an affective persona. These rules and assumptions are informed by transnational racial ideologies, social practices around performances of Blackness, socioeconomic hierarchies, and expectations of belonging on multiple scales, like the neighborhood, nation state, and the market. I am particularly attentive to how Latin American migrant and U.S.-born Latino women engage in a process of racial learning that renders them “street therapists” dedicated to observing and correcting “defective” (non-marketable) forms of Blackness, developing appropriate feeling rules, and, hesitantly embracing a docility valued in an exploitative service sector economy.