About

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: 'Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles' (2006), 'How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts' (2014), and 'A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community' (2022), which was a finalist for the James Beard Award. This latest work chronicles the lives of immigrant workers, including her grandmother, who became placemakers and nurtured their communities through restaurants serving as urban anchors. In 2020, Molina was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, becoming the second faculty member at USC Dornsife to receive this honor. She has served as a councilmember of the Library of Congress, on the advisory board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and as the W.M. Keck Interim Director of Research at the Huntington Library. Molina has won numerous teaching awards and the USC Faculty Mentoring Award for Mentoring Graduate Students in 2023-24. She also writes for the wider public, with publications in outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Currently, she is working on a new book titled 'The Silent Hands that Shaped the Huntington Library: A History of Its Immigrant Workers'.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• History
• Literature
• Art
• Archaeology
• Philosophy
• Law

Selected publications

• God, His Word, and women’s empowerment: Employing the Spirit to kill the letter

  TransÜD · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2023 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  Advancing a historical analysis of race, immigration, and disability, Natalia Molina offers an examination of how public health and immigration discourses defined Mexican immigrants as culturally or physically unfit for citizenship.

  PublisherDOI

• 15. Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

  2023-10-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Democratizing Finance: The “Citizen Fund”as an Institutional Proposal to Structurally Consider Non-Pecuniary Returns in Investment Decisions

  Journal of Economic Issues · 2023-04-03

  articleSenior author

  An important element to explain the current multi-dimensional crises is the inability of capitalist institutions to consider non-pecuniary returns to investments (NPRI) in investment decisions. Orthodox economics highlights the creative force of the monetary profit motive, which translates into cultural habits and political decisions leading to overinvestment in harmful activities and underinvestment in desirable sectors. The flipside of this excessive trust in the monetary profit motive and markets is the weakening of the democratic institutions and the mistrust from the citizenry. Here, an archetype of a novel instrument for democratic finance is presented, to measure NPRIs, reconciling individual and collective action, harmonizing innovation, investment, and democracy.

  PublisherDOI

• Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race by Genevieve Carpio

  American studies · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Sociology

  Reviewed by: Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race by Genevieve Carpio Natalia Molina COLLISIONS AT THE CROSSROADS: HOW PLACE AND MOBILITY MAKE RACE. By Genevieve Carpio. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. For over forty years in ethnic studies, we scholars have examined "race-making" practices in sustained scholarly ways. We have examined the role of structural forces (e.g. laws, policies), as well as cultural narratives (e.g. media, representations) across fields. We have learned much and yet Carpio has managed to show us a new way of seeing by bringing Mobility Studies into the conversation on how race is made. Mobility as a race-making concept is so powerful that once you see it, you cannot un-see it. In her book, Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race, Carpio examines the history of California's Inland Empire across the span of the twentieth century, beginning with the rise of the citrus industry. In this work, she demonstrates how "mobility has been an active force in racialization over the twentieth century, one that has operated alongside 'place' to shape regional memory and belonging in multiracial communities" (5). Her strongly argued thesis is firmly supported by close examinations of the everyday movement of racialized immigrant communities. At times, she contrasts the experience of these racialized communities with that of dominant white communities, which enjoyed a right to mobility, as well as settlement, often denied to racialized communities. Carpio conducted research in over thirty archives to put these shards of evidence into conversation with one another and construct this history. What is so fascinating about Carpio's work is the way she elucidates how mobility, and the lack of it, can serve to depict groups as entitled or as unworthy—and then how these scripts might flip depending on what was at stake. As the citrus industry developed in the nineteenth century, for example, Mexicans living in the new state of California were dispossessed of their land under the California Land Act of 1851. Under the Homestead Act of 1860, this land was redistributed to whites who were depicted as more worthy of settling on the land, making them better candidates for land development. Indigenous peoples, who were considered nomadic, were not even considered as possible land owners, though of course it was their land to begin with. Similarly, Japanese were not allowed to settle long-term in the first half of the twentieth century. Japanese were depicted as so undesirable that under the Alien Land Law Acts beginning in California in 1913 they were not allowed to own land or lease it for more than three years, a law that stayed on the books until it was overturned in 1952. As such, we see how settlement, in contrast to mobility, was an important tool for maintaining a racial hierarchy in the region and securing racial capitalism for whites only. [End Page 109] A relational understanding of race is central to Carpio's argument about how mobility can shape ideas about race differently. In the previous example, we can see how one group's acquisition of resources (land for settled whites, not for supposedly nomadic or itinerant others) is made possible by those resources being stripped away from others. This is more than comparing and contrasting one group to another: her work is central in showing how the freedoms and privileges of one group actively depend on those privileges being denied to others. Overall, Collisions at the Crossroads provides groundbreaking insights into how mobility allowed some groups to become insiders and how the lack of it forced other groups to become outsiders, occupying different places in the regional racial hierarchy. This is a strongly original and insightful work. Natalia Molina Distinguished Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity University of Southern California Copyright © 2022 Mid-America American Studies Association

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter one. Finding a Place in Echo Park

  2022-04-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Place at the Nayarit

  2022-04-19

  book1st authorCorresponding

  "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 the tastes of their patria chica, one another, and 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 decades. Their stories illuminate the many facets of the immigrant experience, from the pressures of racism and segregation, to the complex networks of family and community, the cross-currents of gender and sexuality, and the small but essential pleasures of daily life. The Nayarit was a local landmark, popular with Hollywood stars as well as restaurant workers from across the city, and beloved for its fresh, traditionally 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, and will resonate with anyone who has felt like an outsider, but had a special place where they felt like an insider"--

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter three. The Emotional Life of Immigration

  2022-04-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• eight Regulating Borders and Bodies

  2020-09-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• La Huerta como Laboratorio Didáctico

  2020

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy

  Proyecto de Extension aprobado por el Programa ENHEBRO (Acta N° 38, Res. N° 34 del CFE del 27/10/2020) con los requisitos establecidos en la convocatoria

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Doreen E. Valentine

  Association of Research Libraries

  9 shared

• Amy Fairchild

  Association of Research Libraries

  9 shared

• Rachel Lee

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  9 shared

• Devra Weber

  California State University, Northridge

  9 shared

• Sharla Fett

  California State University, Northridge

  9 shared

• Robert Marshall

  California State University, Northridge

  9 shared

• Russell E. Johnson

  Michigan State University

  9 shared

• Teresa Johnson

  University of Southern California

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• MacArthur Fellowship (2020)
• James Beard Award finalist for A Place at the Nayarit (2022)