Natalia Molina - A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community

My grandmother used to say, Dime con quin andas, y te dir quin eres: Tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who you are. That dictum applies to my writing as well as my life. I am not a close-hauled writer. I depend on conversations and colleagues to help the writing grow and mature. Throughout this project and the ones that came before, I shared my work at different stages and in different ways. Thank you to George Snchez and George Lipsitz, who have been my frontline readers for three monographs now. We would meet at a downtown Mexican restaurant (where else?) where we drank pots of coffee and talked until I had a plan to get what I had on the page to look something like the narrative that was in my mind. I am also grateful to live near the Huntington Library, which is an unofficial coworking space for academics in the Los Angeles area. I talked through many ideas with experts who work there regularly or were passing through. A special shout-out to Bill Deverell, Miriam Pawel, Eric Avila, Veronica Castillo-Muoz, Wade Graham, Tom Sitton, Oliver Wang, and Richard White. I was fortunate as well to have a short-term Huntington fellowship at the same time as Jos Alamillo, Rosina Lozano, and Jerry Gonzlez, and I regularly bounced ideas off them during long lunches and walks in the gardens. Josh Kun generously brought me into the Southern California Foodways Project, a warm and generative community.

I am grateful for many opportunities to present parts of the in-progress manuscript, including invitations from the Latinx Project and the Food Studies Program at New York University; the Newberry Librarys seminar in Borderlands and Latino/a Studies; the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Irvine; the University of Iowas Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Imagining Latinidades; the American Studies Program at Yale University; and the U.S. History Workshop at the University of Chicago. A special thanks to Merry Ovnick and Josh Sides, who invited me to deliver the annual W.P. Whitsett Lecture at California State University, Northridge, which served to kick off this book. It was especially meaningful to share my work on migration with audiences outside of the United States, taking my findings on the Cuban experience in Los Angeles to the Casa de las Amricas in Havana, Cuba, and to Chinese historians of the United States at Northeast Normal University in Changchun, China. I also gained much from presenting to public audiences at the Autry National Center, the Huntington Library, and the Los Angeles Plaza de Cultura y Artes.

It does not matter how many books youve written, each new one is just as difficult. But I have learned to make it fun whenever possible and to always have some company. Thanks to Alina Mndez and Jorge Leal, who were my graduate students when this project started and are now professors and with whom I wrote the first draft of this book. Also, every writer needs a writing accountability group like my WAGettes Evelyn Alsultany, Neetu Khanna, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins. They kept me focused and were there to celebrate the milestones, not just the big ones. I owe a special shout-out to Evelyn, who kept me going as I finished this book in the zoom where it happens.

I have been blessed to find two intellectual homes: first in the University of Californa, San Diego (UCSD), Department of History and since 2018 in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC). In both places I have been graced with many interlocutors among my students and colleagues. In addition, conversations with friends and colleagues via email, at conferences and invited talks, and over shared meals and coffee served to light my way, about the book and about how to make time to write. Thank you to Meg Wesling, Nancy Postero, Cathy Gere, Hildie Kraus, Sara Johnson, Simeon Man, Pamela Radcliff, Danny Widener, Nayan Shah, Juan de Lara, Miroslava Chvez-Garca, Kelly Lytle Hernndez, David Roediger, John Carlos Rowe, and Heather Maynard.

Thank you to those who took time from their own writing to give insightful feedback on mine: Ramn Gutirrez, Vicki Ruiz, Luis Alvarez, David Gutirrez, Nancy Kwak, Kathleen Belew, Rebecca Kinney, Alan Kraut, Judith Smith, and Alyssa Smith. Genevieve Carpio, Laura Barraclough, and Mark Padoongpatt generously served as reviewers for the press. Its a special thrill to get the feedback of people whose work you are in conversation with in your research and teaching. Last, I thank Isabella Furth, David Lobenstine, and Megan Pugh for their sharp editorial skills and gifts for bringing clarity to complex ideas.

For my first two books, I worked in archives, gathering evidence of worlds I did not personally know; the challenge was crafting those shards into a story that told us something about what it meant to be Mexican in the United States and why we think about race the way that we do. But this is a book about a place and a people that have no archiveswhat I call the underdocumented. And so the challenge was the complete opposite: I had the story or at least a piece of it: I had grown up in this place (Echo Park), with many of these people, and I knew that being raised by placemakers in a cultural crossroads had shaped my own experience, my identity. But the shards were much harder to find. Im especially grateful to the many people who shared their experiences with me in oral interviews. I also called on talented and knowledgeable librarians for help in my ongoing search for information, including Kelly Smith at UCSD and Christal Young at USC. Andy Rutkowski, also at USC, made me a better spatial thinker with his GIS expertise. I must give special thanks to research guru Harold Colson at UCSD. Whenever I was at a dead end in a genealogical or city directory search, he would find another angle and unearth another fragment, helping make the details in this book sharper and fleshed out. And on top of it all, telling this story required rummaging through a lot of haystacks in hopes of finding a needle. Thanks to Alina Mndez, Jorge Leal, and Laura Dominguez for their research assistance on that quest.