Molina—a MacArthur Fellow and a distinguished professor at the University of Southern California—is a preeminent historian, examining questions of community and belonging and race. In this, her third book, she turns her attention inward, to her family. The author’s grandmother Doña Natalia Barraza opened a restaurant called the Nayarit in Los Angeles in 1951, and it quickly became not only a beloved eatery but also a community center for both its workers and its patrons, many of whom had emigrated from Mexico. Molina’s work here walks the line between personal history and research, framing the restaurant as an essential landscape and highlighting the necessity of placemaking, especially in a city where divisions can be fueled by ethnic differences and entrenched discrimination.
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