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). Her most recent book is A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community (UC Press, 2022), on immigrant workers as placemakers—including her grandmother—who nurtured and fed the community through the restaurants they established, which served as urban anchors. She co-edited Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method and Practice, and is now at work on The Silent Hands that Shaped the Huntington: A History of Its Mexican Workers. In addition to publishing widely in scholarly journals, she has also written for the L.A. Times, Washington Post, San Diego Union-Tribune, and more. Molina was a 2020 MacArthur Fellow.