This ethnographic study examined the way the University Industrial Complex creates an informal economy. This study interrogated how the lines between the formal and informal sector are increasingly becoming blurred as both economic systems require a powerful workforce (consisting of faculty, administrators, graduate students, undergraduate students, etc.) whose social reproduction is secured by a powerless army of service workers who live and work in the shadows of the university, that is, in college-towns such as Mountain View. The following methodologies were utilized: ethnography, semi-structured and face-to-face interviews, shadowing, and police ride-a-longs. The findings revealed that an informal economy is internally stratified in what I call a dual-informal economy between powerful students and powerless non-students (Latina/o immigrants, gangs, and alumni). Mountain View's informal economy is not an equal playing field, but it involves a major component of social control, which keep an army of informal laborers in their place through selective criminalization, that is, criminalization of classed and racialized communities who are victimized. In this case, the state especially in the form of the police and other social control agencies criminalize the informal economic activities of the powerless and tends to ignore those of the powerful and privileged sectors. As a consequence, the powerless developed creative responses at the level of their individual and collective agency in order to challenge hyper-criminalization and hyper-surveillance by being covert about their income generating practices. Finally, this ethnography suggests we must refine existing theories in the informal economy.