Author and professor Natalia Molina stopped by the Bunker to talk about her latest book, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant in Los Angeles Nourished its Community. Natalia and Brad has a long, wide-ranging discussion about comedians (Steve Martin, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler in particular), audio books, meeting famous people, and the trauma of academia.
Plus, how place intersects with race, class, and gender in America.
About Natalia Molina
Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is currently serving as Interim Director of Research at the Huntington, temporarily stepping down from its Board of Governors while a search for a new director is underway.
Her own 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.
