Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Dean’s Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the interconnected histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is the author of three award-winning books: How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts; Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940; and, most recently, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, which the Los Angeles Times calls an “essential Los Angeles book.” The winner of the Popular Culture Association book award, a finalist for a James Beard Award, and the recipient of honorable mentions from several other organizations, A Place at the Nayarit chronicles the lives of immigrant workers, including Molina’s grandmother, who became placemakers, nurturing and feeding their communities at restaurants that served as urban anchors. She is at work on a new book, The Silent Hands that Shaped the Huntington: A History of Its Mexican Workers. Professor Molina has written for the LA Times, Washington Post, San Diego Union-Tribune, and elsewhere. She is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow.
Natalia Molina
Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and
Dean's Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California
Specializing in History, Latinx Studies, Immigration, Gender, Foodways, and Public Health
about
Dr. Molina
Professor Molina is also proud of her efforts to advance diversity in higher education. At the University of California, San Diego, she served as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Diversity and Equity and as the Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities; her work was recognized by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. She was also Director of the University of California Education Abroad Program in Spain and a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee for the University of California’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. She served a six-year term on the board of California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and currently serves on several boards, including those of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens and the Scholars Council for the Library of Congress. Professor Molina’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations. A Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and an elected member of the Society of American Historians, she has given lectures in Latin America, Asia, Europe, as well as over 30 of the 50 United States. In 2018, she was the Organization of American Historians China Residency scholar. A certified mediator, she enjoys opportunities for intellectual and cultural exchange, whether in the classroom, lecture hall, or over a restaurant table.
Accolades
2023 James Beard Award Media nominee ™
2023 PROSE Awards Finalist for North American and U.S. History Category
2023 Popular Culture Association – John G. Cawelti Award for the Best Textbook/Primer
Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association’s
Norris & Carol Hundley Book Award
Books
A Place at the Nayarit
How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community
In a world that sought to reduce Mexican immigrants to invisible labor, the Nayarit was a place where people could become visible once again, where they could speak out, claim space, and belong. In 1951, Doña Natalia Barraza opened the Nayarit, a Mexican restaurant in Echo Park, Los Angeles. With A Place at the Nayarit, historian Natalia Molina traces the life’s work of her grandmother, remembered by all who knew her as Doña Natalia––a generous, reserved, and extraordinarily capable woman. Doña Natalia immigrated alone from Mexico to L.A., adopted two children, and ran a successful business. She also sponsored, housed, and employed dozens of other immigrants, encouraging them to lay claim to a city long characterized by anti-Latinx racism. Together, the employees and customers of the Nayarit maintained ties to their old homes while providing one another safety and support.
The Nayarit was much more than a popular eating spot: it was an urban anchor for a robust community, a gathering space where ethnic Mexican workers and customers connected with their patria chica (their “small country”). That meant connecting with distinctive tastes, with one another, and with the city they now called home. Through deep research and vivid storytelling, Molina follows restaurant workers from the kitchen and the front of the house across borders and through the decades. These people’s stories illuminate the many facets of the immigrant experience: immigrants’ complex networks of family and community and the small but essential pleasures of daily life, as well as cross-currents of gender and sexuality and pressures of racism and segregation. The Nayarit was a local landmark, popular with both Hollywood stars and restaurant workers from across the city and beloved for its fresh, traditionally prepared Mexican food. But as Molina argues, it was also, and most importantly, a place where ethnic Mexicans and other Latinx L.A. residents could step into the fullness of their lives, nourishing themselves and one another. A Place at the Nayarit is a stirring exploration of how racialized minorities create a sense of belonging. It will resonate with anyone who has felt like an outsider and had a special place where they felt like an insider.
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.
Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship
Relational Formations of Race
Theory, Method, and Practice
Relational Formations of Race brings African American, Chicanx/Latinx, Asian American, and Native American studies together in a single volume, enabling readers to consider the racialization and formation of subordinated groups in relation to one another. These essays conceptualize racialization as a dynamic and interactive process; group-based racial constructions are formed not only in relation to whiteness, but also in relation to other devalued and marginalized groups. The chapters offer explicit guides to understanding race as relational across all disciplines, time periods, regions, and social groups. By studying race relationally, and through a shared context of meaning and power, students will draw connections among subordinated groups and will better comprehend the logic that underpins the forms of inclusion and dispossession such groups face. As the United States shifts toward a minority-majority nation, Relational Formations of Race offers crucial tools for understanding today’s shifting race dynamics.
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.
Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association’s Norris & Carol Hundley Award
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Curriculum Vitae
Academic & Administrative Appointments
Academic
2023-
Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Dean’s Professor
2020-2021
Huntington Library Fellow
2018-
Professor, Department of American Studies & Ethnicity, University of Southern California
2017-2018
National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellow
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
Administrative
2022 - 2023
W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research, Interim, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens2019–2020
Inaugural Dean’s Administration Mellon Foundation Fellow
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, 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