When in a new country, a place where you can have a meal of familiar food among people who speak encouraging words in your mother tongue can make you feel welcome and safe. That’s exactly the kind of place Doña Natalia Barraza created after she immigrated to Los Angeles from Mexico. Opened in Echo Park in 1951, the Nayarit was a local landmark, popular with Hollywood stars and restaurant workers from across the city and beloved for its fresh, traditionally prepared Mexican food.

Natalia Molina is a professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California. Her research explores the intertwined histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is the author of How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (UC Press, 2014) and Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1940 (UC Press, 2006).

Associate Professor of Sociology Krystale Littlejohn discusses her new book, Just Get on the Pill, which investigates how birth control becomes a fundamentally unbalanced and gendered responsibility. She uncovers how parents, peers, partners, and providers draw on narratives of male and female birth control methods to socialize cisgender women into sex and ultimately into shouldering the burden for preventing pregnancy.