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Natalia Molina

Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity

University of Southern California

Specializing in History, Latinx Studies, Immigration, Gender, Foodways, and Public Health

2020 MacArthur Fellow

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about Dr. Molina

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Professor Molina’s work lies at the intersections of race, gender, culture, and citizenship.

Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the intertwined histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is the author of the award-winning books, How Race Is Made in America:  Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts and Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940. Her most recent book is A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, on immigrant workers as placemakers —including her grandmother—who nurtured and fed the community through the restaurants they established, which served as urban anchors. She co- edited Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method and Practice, and is now at work on a new book, The Silent Hands that Shaped the Huntington: A History of Its Mexican Workers. In addition to publishing widely in scholarly journals, she has also written for the LA Times, Washington Post, San Diego Union-Tribune, and more. Professor Molina is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow.

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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.

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Books

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A Place at the Nayarit

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.

Reviews

How Race is Made in America

How Race Was Made in American

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

Awards

  • Texas A and M

    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.

Reviews

Fit to Be Citizens?

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

Awards

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    Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association’s Norris & Carol Hundley Award

A Place at the Nayarit

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.

Reviews

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Awards

  • Texas A and M

    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

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.

Reviews

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Awards

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    Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association’s Norris & Carol Hundley Award

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

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Selected Articles

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    “Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the Early Twentieth Century United States”

    Radical History Review, December 2005, pp. 22-37.

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    “The Importance of Place and Place-makers in the Life of a Los Angeles Community: What Gentrification Erases from Echo Park”

    Southern California Quarterly, Volume 97, Spring 2015 No. 1, pp. 69-111.
    Best article award, Historical Society of Southern California

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    “The Long Arc of Dispossession: Racial Capitalism and Contested Notions of Citizenship in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands in the Early Twentieth Century``

    Western Historical Quarterly, Winter 2014 issue, 45.4.

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    “Examining Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens,” part of the special issue on “Chicana/o History”

    Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 82, No. 4, November 2013, 520-541.

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    “Deportable Citizens: The Decoupling of Race and Citizenship in the Construction of the ‘Anchor Baby'``

    in Deportation in the Americas: Histories of Exclusion and Resistance (note: in Italics just like the journal citation information
    Best article award, Western History Association

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    “Borders, Laborers, and Racialized Medicalization: Mexican Immigration and US Public Health Policy in the Twentieth-Century”

    American Journal of Public Health, 101 no. 6 (2011), 1024-1031.

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    “The Importance of Place and Place-makers in the Life of a Los Angeles Community: What Gentrification Erases from Echo Park”

    Southern California Quarterly, Volume 97, Spring 2015 No. 1, pp. 69-111.
    Best article award, Historical Society of Southern California

  • icon

    “The Long Arc of Dispossession: Racial Capitalism and Contested Notions of Citizenship in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands in the Early Twentieth Century``

    Western Historical Quarterly, Winter 2014 issue, 45.4.

  • icon

    “Examining Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens,” part of the special issue on “Chicana/o History”

    Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 82, No. 4, November 2013, 520-541.

  • null

    “Deportable Citizens: The Decoupling of Race and Citizenship in the Construction of the ‘Anchor Baby'``

    in Deportation in the Americas: Histories of Exclusion and Resistance (note: in Italics just like the journal citation information
    Best article award, Western History Association

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    “Borders, Laborers, and Racialized Medicalization: Mexican Immigration and US Public Health Policy in the Twentieth-Century”

    American Journal of Public Health, 101 no. 6 (2011), 1024-1031.

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    “Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the Early Twentieth Century United States”

    Radical History Review, December 2005, pp. 22-37.

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Curriculum Vitae

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Academic & Administrative Appointments

Academic

  • 2021-

    Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity

  • 2020-2021

    Huntington Library Fellowship

  • 2018-

    Professor, Department of American Studies & Ethnicity, University of Southern California

  • 2017-2018

    National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship

  • 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

  • 2019–2020

    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

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

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Book Events

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    Los Angeles Times, Festival of Books

    University of Southern California
    Sunday, April 24
    In conversation with Luis J. Rodriguez and Gustavo Arellano; Moderator: Daniel Hernandez
    and
    In conversation with George J. Sanchez and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo; Moderator: Juan De Lara
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    The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW)

    webinar
    Wednesday, May  18, 12 pm
    In conversation with Kelly Lytle Hernández; Moderator:Gustavo Arellano
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    Alta Baja Market

    Santa Ana, CA
    Saturday, June 25, 1 pm
    In conversation with Gustavo Arellano
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    Fall 2022, dates TBD

    The Levan Institute for the Humanities, USC
    University of Kansas

    University of Oregon

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    Stories Book & Cafe

    Echo Park, Los Angeles
    Sunday, May 5, 6 pm

    In conversation with Jesus Sanchez, Publisher of The Eastsider LA

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    Vroman’s Bookstore

    Pasadena, CA
    Thursday, June 23, 7 pm 
    In conversation with Michael Begler, producer and writer
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    National Humanities Conference

    Los Angeles, CA
    Thursday, November 10
    Opening Plenary, 6:30 pm

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Contact

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For speaking engagements, please contact
Kevin Mills
The Tuesday Agency
404 East College Street, Suite 408
Iowa City, Iowa 52240
o: 319-338-5640

[email protected]