A Place at the Nayarit

In her latest book, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, distinguished professor, scholar, and MacArthur Fellow Natalia Molina centers place-making and relational space in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park. In a story about her family, Molina beautifully narrates a history without archives and featuring people who have been “underdocumented,” such as Natalia Barraza and the many people that worked and ate at the Nayarit. Centered on a Mexican restaurant, A Place at the Nayarit highlights a micro history of turning space into place or “how marginalized people can create their own places in ways that reclaim dignity, create social cohesion, and foster mutual aid” (p. 8).Throughout the book, Molina emphasizes the importance of the Nayarit for the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural population of Echo Park, a community that Doña Natalia helped build. Working-class immigrants became place-makers with the assistance of urban anchors such as the Nayarit. It was a safe space where visitors, largely ethnic Mexicans, could speak Spanish, feel a sense of home and belonging, and create social networks. The food sold at the Nayarit symbolized this sense of place as Doña Natalia “refused to sacrifice distinctiveness in order to accommodate mainstream American palates” (p. 73).A Place at the Nayarit has many strengths, including Molina's ability to piece together a history with so few sources. Yet, by interviewing community and family members Molina was able to center the experiences of queer immigrants, a pressing need within immigration scholarship, as Molina points out. She centers queer place-making and argues that the Nayarit “offered a safe place where gay customers could come without fearing harassment by the police or other customers” (p. 120). This book will be of great interest to anyone seeking to learn more about food politics, the built environment, and until recently, invisible histories of Los Angeles

Archaeology · Dignity · Ethnic group · Immigration · Mainstream · Media studies · Political science · Scholarship · Social space · Sociology · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

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