Natalia Molina
Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, History, Latinx Studies, Immigration, Gender, Urban Studies, & Public Health
University of Southern California
Professor Molina’s work lies at the intersections of race, gender, culture, and citizenship.
Professor Molina is the author of two award winning books. Her first book, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939, explored the ways in which race is constructed relationally and regionally. In that work, which garnered the Noris and Carol Hundley book prize of the PCB-American Historical Association, she argues that race must be understood comparatively in order to see how the laws, practices, and attitudes directed at one racial group affected others. Fit to Be Citizens? demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century.
Her second book, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, examines Mexican immigration–from 1924 when immigration acts drastically reduced immigration to the U.S. to 1965 when many quotas were abolished–to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what she describes as an immigration regime that defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the U.S. about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity. Through the use of a relational lens, How Race Is Made in America demonstrates that racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.
She continues to explore the themes of race, space, labor, immigration, gender and urban history in her book in progress. With the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship, she is expanding her award-winning article, “The Importance of Place and Place-makers in the Life of a Los Angeles Community: What Gentrification Erases from Echo Park” into a book. She is also co-editing a volume entitled Studying Race Relationally.
Professor Molina served as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Diversity and Equity. She has also served as the Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities twice and before that as the Director for University of California Education Abroad Program in Granada, Córdoba, and Cádiz, Spain. She is on the Faculty Advisory Committee for the University of California’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She recently concluded a six-year term on the board of California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
She enjoys opportunities for intellectual and cultural exchanges and has traveled extensively for work and pleasure to Canada, Mexico, Central America, Europe, Asia, and North Africa, as well as over 30 of the 50 United States.
How Race is Made in America
How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, University of California Press, 2014
Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.
Reviews
“Molina argues and convincingly demonstrates that “Immigration laws are perhaps the most powerful and effective means of constructed and reordering the social order in the United States.”
Michael Omi, Pacific Historical Review
“Molina provides a fresh, sophisticated analysis of the powerful racial ‘scripts’ generated in twentieth-century US political and legal culture, and of the Mexican population’s unique vulnerability in the 1920s and after as eminently ‘deportable.’ …
… This book’s importance is sadly substantiated by twenty-first-century headlines about immigration policy, ‘papers please’ laws, and urban policing. A critical contribution.”
Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of Whiteness
of a Different Color and Barbarian Virtues
Awards
Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship
Fit to Be Citizens?
Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940, University of California Press, 2006
Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Fit to Be Citizens? demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group.
The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina’s compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.
Reviews
“An important advance on previous dissections of the close (and ongoing) links between medicine and racialization in the United States …
… Molina has written an engaging history that is all the more compelling for its relevance to racialization in the 21st century.”
American Journal Of Sociology / AJS
“Molina accomplishes a formidable feat in this book through incisive analysis, elegant prose, and a passionate engagement with the cruel paradox …
… that groups who suffer poor health due to political, social, and economic disenfranchisement all too often are scapegoated as disease vectors. …
… Fit to Be Citizens? is a sophisticated monograph that should serve as a model for ethnic studies scholarship on race, …
… health, and the body politic in modern America.”
Western Historical Qtly
“This riveting study crosses boundaries of both discipline and nationality to marvelous effect.”
David Roediger, author of Working Toward Whiteness
Awards
Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association’s Norris & Carol Hundley Award
Awards
Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship
How Race is Made in America
How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, University of California Press, 2014
Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.
Reviews
“Molina argues and convincingly demonstrates that “Immigration laws are perhaps the most powerful and effective means of constructed and reordering the social order in the United States.”
Michael Omi, Pacific Historical Review
“Molina provides a fresh, sophisticated analysis of the powerful racial ‘scripts’ generated in twentieth-century US political and legal culture, and of the Mexican population’s unique vulnerability in the 1920s and after as eminently ‘deportable.’ …
… This book’s importance is sadly substantiated by twenty-first-century headlines about immigration policy, ‘papers please’ laws, and urban policing. A critical contribution.”
Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of Whiteness
of a Different Color and Barbarian Virtues
Fit to Be Citizens?
Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940, University of California Press, 2006
Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Fit to Be Citizens? demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group.
The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina’s compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.
Reviews
“An important advance on previous dissections of the close (and ongoing) links between medicine and racialization in the United States. Molina has written an engaging history that is all the more compelling for its relevance to racialization in the 21st century.”
American Journal Of Sociology / AJS
“Molina accomplishes a formidable feat in this book through incisive analysis, elegant prose, and a passionate engagement with the cruel paradox that groups who suffer poor health due to political, social, and economic disenfranchisement …
… all too often are scapegoated as disease vectors. Fit to Be Citizens? is a sophisticated monograph that should serve as a model for ethnic studies scholarship on race, health, and the body politic in modern America.”
Western Historical Qtly
“This riveting study crosses boundaries of both discipline and nationality to marvelous effect.”
David Roediger, author of Working Toward Whiteness
Awards
Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association’s Norris & Carol Hundley Award
Southern California Quarterly
“The Importance of Place and Place-makers in the Life of a Los Angeles Community: What Gentrification Erases from Echo Park”
Volume 97, Spring 2015 No. 1, pp. 69-111.
Winner of the Historical Society of Southern California’s Carl I. Wheat and Frank Wheat Award
Western Historical Quarterly
“The Long Arc of Dispossession: Racial Capitalism and Contested Notions of Citizenship in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands in the Early Twentieth Century”
Winter 2014 issue, 45.4.
Pacific Historical Review
“Examining Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens,” part of the special issue on “Chicana/o History,”
Vol. 82, No. 4, November 2013, 520-541.
American Journal of Public Health
“Borders, Laborers, and Racialized Medicalization: Mexican Immigration and US Public Health Policy in the Twentieth-Century”
101 no. 6 (2011), 1024-1031.
Radical History Review
“Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the Early Twentieth Century United States”
December 2005, pp. 22-37.
Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies
“Illustrating Cultural Authority: Medicalized Representations of Mexican Communities in Early Twentieth Century Los Angeles”
Spring 2003, pp. 129-143.
Southern California Quarterly
“The Importance of Place and Place-makers in the Life of a Los Angeles Community: What Gentrification Erases from Echo Park”
Volume 97, Spring 2015 No. 1, pp. 69-111.
Winner of the Historical Society of Southern California’s Carl I. Wheat and Frank Wheat AwardWestern Historical Quarterly
“The Long Arc of Dispossession: Racial Capitalism and Contested Notions of Citizenship in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands in the Early Twentieth Century”
Winter 2014 issue, 45.4.Pacific Historical Review
“Examining Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens,” part of the special issue on “Chicana/o History,”
Vol. 82, No. 4, November 2013, 520-541.
American Journal of Public Health
“Borders, Laborers, and Racialized Medicalization: Mexican Immigration and US Public Health Policy in the Twentieth-Century”
101 no. 6 (2011), 1024-1031.Radical History Review
“Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the Early Twentieth Century United States”
December 2005, pp. 22-37.Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies
“Illustrating Cultural Authority: Medicalized Representations of Mexican Communities in Early Twentieth Century Los Angeles”
Spring 2003, pp. 129-143.
Academic
2017-2018
On fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities, Public Scholar Award
2015-present
Professor, Department of History & Urban Studies Program, University of California, San Diego
2010-2015
Associate Professor, Department of History & Urban Studies Program, University of California, San Diego
2006-2010
Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies & Urban Studies Program, University of California, San Diego
2001-2006
Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies & Urban Studies, University of California, San Diego
1998-1999
Lecturer, Antioch University, Marina del Rey, California
Administrative
2016-2017
Associate Dean, Division of Arts and Humanities
2014-2015
Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Diversity and Equity
2011-2014
Associate Dean for Faculty Equity, Division of Arts & Humanities
2008-2010
Director of Graduate Studies, Ethnic Studies Department
2007-2008
Director for University of California Education Abroad Program in Granada, Córdoba, & Cádiz, Spain
Education
B.A.
History & Women’s Studies Double Major University of California, Los Angeles
M.A.
U.S. History University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Ph.D.
U.S. History University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Education
B.A.
History & Women’s Studies Double Major University of California, Los Angeles
M.A.
U.S. History University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Ph.D.
U.S. History University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Chicana/o History
350 student lecture course
Dimensions of Culture: Diversity
350 student lecture course Thurgood Marshall College Freshmen course
Gender & Immigration
Senior Seminar & Graduate Seminar
The History of Race in the United States; Race and the City
Senior Seminar & Graduate Seminar
Race, Disease and Globalization; Race, Health and Inequality
Upper Division & Graduate Seminar
Masters Theses Preparation
Graduate Seminar
Multicultural Pedagogy
Teacher Credential Program
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