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A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community
Natalia Molina unveils the hidden history of the Nayarit, a restaurant in Los Angeles that nourished its community of Mexican immigrants with a sense of belonging.
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 it was an urban anchor for a robust community, a gathering space where ethnic Mexican workers and customers connected with their patria chica (their “small country”). That meant connecting with distinctive tastes, with one another, and with 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 through the decades. These people's stories illuminate the many facets of the immigrant immigrants' complex networks of family and community and the small but essential pleasures of daily life, as well as cross-currents of gender and sexuality and pressures of racism and segregation. The Nayarit was a local landmark, popular with both Hollywood stars and restaurant workers from across the city and beloved for its fresh, traditionally prepared 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. It will resonate with anyone who has felt like an outsider and had a special place where they felt like an insider.
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 it was an urban anchor for a robust community, a gathering space where ethnic Mexican workers and customers connected with their patria chica (their “small country”). That meant connecting with distinctive tastes, with one another, and with 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 through the decades. These people's stories illuminate the many facets of the immigrant immigrants' complex networks of family and community and the small but essential pleasures of daily life, as well as cross-currents of gender and sexuality and pressures of racism and segregation. The Nayarit was a local landmark, popular with both Hollywood stars and restaurant workers from across the city and beloved for its fresh, traditionally prepared 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. It will resonate with anyone who has felt like an outsider and had a special place where they felt like an insider.
312 pages, Hardcover
First published April 19, 2022
22 people are currently reading
942 people want to read
About the author
Natalia Molina
40 books18 followersDr. Natalia Molina is Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Professor Molina is a 2020 MacArthur fellow, and her work sits at the intersections of race, culture, immigration, and citizenship with the goal of helping us understand everyday issues in the world today.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
August 30, 2025
[BOOKCLUB] I liked parts of this book but I’m not sure I liked the book as a whole. I think the first half was far more compelling than the second, which to me felt slightly too sprawling and moved away from the focus on Doña Natalia and the restaurant. I enjoy histories at this scale, which can offer a more personal view into national events, and I think the subject chosen was a worthwhile one.
I do wish there was more nuance given to the classism playing out in the midst of all of this — it is not until halfway through the book that the author mentions most of the people Doña Natalia brought over were middle class, and this is afforded very little discussion despite an interesting tension between class in Mexico versus the US. Similarly, a more robust conclusion reflecting on gentrification would have tightened the back half, IMO.
I also felt at times some of her historical comparisons were lazy or oversimplified — she at a few points introduces parallels between Latinx and Black experiences, but I found her unfair in places. For example, she spends a page offering plenty of nuance to her family’s “beauty pageants” but banishes Black beauty pageants to a single sentence, which she uses to dismiss them as conformist (it’s more complicated than that). There were a few other moments like this throughout the book that felt only half considered.
On a final note, I felt the author had an understandably lacking critical eye when it came to her grandmother. Of course I understand the impulse to want to portray your family members positively, both for yourself and for your living family. But it seemed awfully convenient that everyone she spoke to loved her grandmother and had only wonderful things to say. Of course! The people who would have stayed in touch with the family would be those with positive feelings towards Doña Natalia and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find those who left on negative terms. But rather than address this, the author just ignores it.
I do wish there was more nuance given to the classism playing out in the midst of all of this — it is not until halfway through the book that the author mentions most of the people Doña Natalia brought over were middle class, and this is afforded very little discussion despite an interesting tension between class in Mexico versus the US. Similarly, a more robust conclusion reflecting on gentrification would have tightened the back half, IMO.
I also felt at times some of her historical comparisons were lazy or oversimplified — she at a few points introduces parallels between Latinx and Black experiences, but I found her unfair in places. For example, she spends a page offering plenty of nuance to her family’s “beauty pageants” but banishes Black beauty pageants to a single sentence, which she uses to dismiss them as conformist (it’s more complicated than that). There were a few other moments like this throughout the book that felt only half considered.
On a final note, I felt the author had an understandably lacking critical eye when it came to her grandmother. Of course I understand the impulse to want to portray your family members positively, both for yourself and for your living family. But it seemed awfully convenient that everyone she spoke to loved her grandmother and had only wonderful things to say. Of course! The people who would have stayed in touch with the family would be those with positive feelings towards Doña Natalia and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find those who left on negative terms. But rather than address this, the author just ignores it.
October 11, 2022
An informative and interesting look at a part of Los Angeles history, specifically the Echo Park area and how one woman and restaurant really played an important role as an anchor for a Mexican community during the 1950s. It truly gives a wonderful sense of how immigrant communities come together to create kinship families and support in a new environment. However, I think I just wanted more of the personal stories that would have brought this book to life even more. It is very well researched as half the book is footnotes and references but as the author had ties to Doña Natalia Barraza, I guess I would have wanted to feel that personal connection a bit more rather than the clinical feeling I had like I was reading this for sociology class.
August 14, 2023
Loved all of the history of Echo Park/Los Angeles and how this restaurant created space for immigrants, restaurant workers, and Latinx people in LA in the 60s at a time when it seemed unattainable. I admit it started to get repetitive after a while, and I felt like I read the words placemaking and placetaking at least 500 times, but all in all it was interesting and I have recommended it to a few people.
June 2, 2022
The power of community and family and place curated by an incredible woman. “I think about this community when I eat from the dishes…that Dona Natalia collected. They’re from the Franciscan Ceramics plant in Atwater, hand-painted with apples and leaves…she got it for herself, piece by piece.” Natalia Molina “A Place At The Nayarit”. My dishes too, collected piece by piece.
November 22, 2022
When is a restaurant more than a place to eat? How and why does this happen? Why is this significant? In the “Introduction: Placemaking in a New Homeland,” Natalia Molina, researcher and scholar, says it is because people recognize, “ … their home is about a feeling rooted to a particular place: a neighborhood, a park, a newsstand, a restaurant. The subjects of this story, most of them working-class immigrants who did not arrive in the United States speaking English, endeavored to make places of their own. They went to work, worshipped in church, attended school, ate out, and, in Doña Natalia’s case, opened a restaurant where people could come together for labor, leisure, and access to a ready-made social network. I call them placemakers.”
They were also people who Natalia Molina calls “underdocumented," because like Nayarit, there are no archives about the place and the people.There was insufficient information written about them, other than what could be gleaned from conversations and memories from those who worked at Nayarit, and those who lived in Echo Park at the time. According to Molina, "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."
It is also about Molina's unwavering research into her family’s history, specifically that of her grandmother, Doña Natalia, the matriarch who created Nayarit, and two other restaurants. Molina never met her grandmother but knew the woman was hardworking and determined; set goals; was never deterred by obstacles; a mastermind at PR; a perfectionist in all aspects of running a restaurant, especially the cooking and food preparation; and was exceedingly generous in helping people find jobs. "As she provided housing to dozens of family and fictive kin, she assumed the status usually reserved for a family's patriarch," despite the fact that she was a single woman and divorced. Doña Natalia’s personal story is phenomenal. She was a woman who had a great deal of moxie and chutzpah, which propelled her forward. She was married at 17; divorced and alone at 21, she crossed the border into the United States in 1922; and soon found work in a restaurant in Los Angeles. For the following eight years, there is no history about her life. “There are no oral interviews, family lore, newspaper clippings, or photos to turn to. But we do know that she was a Mexican in the United States; her skin was dark, she spoke only Spanish, and thus she faced the same discrimination as millions of her country people … had Doña Natalia settled in a predominantly Mexican ethnic enclave, her life would have been very different. Echo Park, however, was diverse and progressive, a welcoming place for Doña Natalia to live and to run her business."
A vital part of this book is the documentation and analysis of a community, its ethnic, racial and gender/sexual components, and later gentrification, which created far-reaching economic issues. It is about where Doña Natalia came from, a small town in the Mexican western coastal state of Nayarit; about Los Angeles and the heritage of its very early cross-cultural history that encompassed “race-making practices” going back to the time when Europeans took over land that had been home to the Chumash Gabrielino-Tongva peoples for over twelve thousand years; the incursion of the Spanish and the mission system to convert indigenous peoples to Catholicism; and "Mexico's geographic reach encompassed all of present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, along with parts of Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming." There is more history that Molina skillfully incorporates into this story of a place, the Nayarit, one woman whose work had consequential effects on many people, and what it meant to those immigrants who lived and worked in the Los Angeles area.
Food, objects, scents can short-circuit our memories about a place in the past. When Natalia Molina eats from the hand-painted dishes, from the long-gone Franciscan Ceramics plant in Atwater, she thinks about her grandmother, who did not show much emotion. However, this was dinnerware that Doña Natalia probably bought piece by piece because she wanted a place of her own, and it was, “ …a way of embracing the place where she lived and asserting her belonging.” In turn, her granddaughter has created an evocative and riveting history that brings that story full circle.
Interview with author Natalia Molina.
Reviewed by Sheryn Morris, Librarian, Literature & Fiction
They were also people who Natalia Molina calls “underdocumented," because like Nayarit, there are no archives about the place and the people.There was insufficient information written about them, other than what could be gleaned from conversations and memories from those who worked at Nayarit, and those who lived in Echo Park at the time. According to Molina, "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."
It is also about Molina's unwavering research into her family’s history, specifically that of her grandmother, Doña Natalia, the matriarch who created Nayarit, and two other restaurants. Molina never met her grandmother but knew the woman was hardworking and determined; set goals; was never deterred by obstacles; a mastermind at PR; a perfectionist in all aspects of running a restaurant, especially the cooking and food preparation; and was exceedingly generous in helping people find jobs. "As she provided housing to dozens of family and fictive kin, she assumed the status usually reserved for a family's patriarch," despite the fact that she was a single woman and divorced. Doña Natalia’s personal story is phenomenal. She was a woman who had a great deal of moxie and chutzpah, which propelled her forward. She was married at 17; divorced and alone at 21, she crossed the border into the United States in 1922; and soon found work in a restaurant in Los Angeles. For the following eight years, there is no history about her life. “There are no oral interviews, family lore, newspaper clippings, or photos to turn to. But we do know that she was a Mexican in the United States; her skin was dark, she spoke only Spanish, and thus she faced the same discrimination as millions of her country people … had Doña Natalia settled in a predominantly Mexican ethnic enclave, her life would have been very different. Echo Park, however, was diverse and progressive, a welcoming place for Doña Natalia to live and to run her business."
A vital part of this book is the documentation and analysis of a community, its ethnic, racial and gender/sexual components, and later gentrification, which created far-reaching economic issues. It is about where Doña Natalia came from, a small town in the Mexican western coastal state of Nayarit; about Los Angeles and the heritage of its very early cross-cultural history that encompassed “race-making practices” going back to the time when Europeans took over land that had been home to the Chumash Gabrielino-Tongva peoples for over twelve thousand years; the incursion of the Spanish and the mission system to convert indigenous peoples to Catholicism; and "Mexico's geographic reach encompassed all of present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, along with parts of Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming." There is more history that Molina skillfully incorporates into this story of a place, the Nayarit, one woman whose work had consequential effects on many people, and what it meant to those immigrants who lived and worked in the Los Angeles area.
Food, objects, scents can short-circuit our memories about a place in the past. When Natalia Molina eats from the hand-painted dishes, from the long-gone Franciscan Ceramics plant in Atwater, she thinks about her grandmother, who did not show much emotion. However, this was dinnerware that Doña Natalia probably bought piece by piece because she wanted a place of her own, and it was, “ …a way of embracing the place where she lived and asserting her belonging.” In turn, her granddaughter has created an evocative and riveting history that brings that story full circle.
Interview with author Natalia Molina.
Reviewed by Sheryn Morris, Librarian, Literature & Fiction
September 19, 2024
Very good for a monograph. I think Carolina would like this/find it useful.
January 2, 2023
A close look at an Echo Park restaurant begun by Molina's grandmother, who sponsored dozens of immigrants from her home state of Nayarit, employed them and even acted as chaperone in the case of young women, and also how her Nayarit restaurant cut across geographic and ethnic lines to become part of L.A. It's a tribute to the unseen impact that one well-loved business can have, its ripple effects across a community. The writing can be formal and academic at times, but the human stories shine through.
Read
May 21, 2022A fantastic interaction of imagrant culture and history with a personal family story of the author. Loved by this Angeleno.
November 10, 2022
repetitive and much more academic than i expected
July 19, 2024
natalia molina is my favorite scholar. i was so impressed by HOW RACE IS MADE IN AMERICA, but A PLACE AT THE NAYARIT is actually the book i wish i would have written (albeit about my own community). in this book, molina turns our attention away from ethnic enclaves and towards a more surprising setting: her family's restaurant in the multiethnic neighborhood of echo park. the multiethnic nature of the setting is important in providing a less rigid environment for the working class mexicans that work at and frequent the restaurant, creating a place especially for divorced women and gay men to simply be, and it also provides a point for cross-cultural and cross-racial connections. molina draws upon a large well of theory to describe the translocal relationships that the subjects of her book have to their patria chica of nayarit in mexico, the way that they took up space and transformed los angeles as placemakers and placetakers, and how her grandmother in particular leveraged her social and business capital in order to build up her community. molina does a great job in illustrating what she describes as "the everyday texture" of her subjects' lives. in an absence of formal archival information, molina enriches her book with oral history and personal anecdotes, which infuses everything with such a deep love. A PLACE AT THE NAYARIT is such an important documentation of an urban anchor, a semipublic space that gave its workers and patrons some reprieve from the otherwise exclusionary and discriminatory landscape of los angeles, and this book resists the cultural and historical erasure wrought by the gentrification of echo park which threatens to claim that nothing was valuable prior to its coffee shops and high rise developments. this is a well written intervention that manages to analyze both the granular and the international. if you love food, families, and are looking for an analysis of multiethnic neighborhoods, this is the one for you!
December 19, 2025
As a born -and-raised Angeleno, I cannot recommend this book enough. While focused on the infamous Nayarit restaurant, whom Molina's Grandmother and mother operated, it really is a history and sociological study of how immigrants of one part of Mexico came to Echo Park and built a beautiful, supportive community largely from a single town in the state of Nayarit in Mexico. As a history nerd if my city, I learned so much from this book, ranging from how Echo Park had a thriving, mostlybkie collar Latino queer to how Nayarit Restaurant was groundbreaking as it was one of the first authentic Mexican restaurants that gained notice by non-Mexican clientele, including Marlon Brando. Doña Natalia, the restaraunt's proprieter was a true community leader as we learn that she helped many of employees who were literal and de facto kin that aided them in their experience immigrating despite the hostilities Mexican immigrants faced then (and still sadly now). I tend to walk by The Echo, a music venue which resides in the space that formerly was Nayarit restaurant, and had no idea how much of an neighborhood anchor. Molina has a gift of weaving in in-depth historical and sociological analysis into non-fiction story telling that the boom is a page turner. This book should be considered a must for anyone trying to learn about Echo Park, but also the Mexican/Chicano/Latino immigrant experience for the first half and middle of the 20th century in Los Angeles
September 11, 2023
This book, "Placemaking in a New Homeland," beautifully uncovers the story of Doña Natalia, a remarkable woman who forged a community hub through her restaurant. Through Molina's heartfelt exploration, we learn about Doña Natalia's resilience and the supportive enclave of Echo Park.
The book masterfully unravels the complex dynamics of ethnicity, race, and gender, as well as the economic impacts of gentrification. Molina's vivid descriptions of sensory triggers like food and objects evoke a powerful sense of nostalgia.
Ultimately, this book is a tribute to the indomitable spirit of those who shaped their own spaces. It offers a poignant glimpse into the heart and soul of mexican restaurants in ponca city. A must-read for those who appreciate stories of tenacity and community.
The book masterfully unravels the complex dynamics of ethnicity, race, and gender, as well as the economic impacts of gentrification. Molina's vivid descriptions of sensory triggers like food and objects evoke a powerful sense of nostalgia.
Ultimately, this book is a tribute to the indomitable spirit of those who shaped their own spaces. It offers a poignant glimpse into the heart and soul of mexican restaurants in ponca city. A must-read for those who appreciate stories of tenacity and community.
September 11, 2025
The book is part biographical, part social commentary of Los Angeles between the 1920s and 1960s. It tells the story of Natalia Barraza, the author's grandmother and namesake, who immigrated from the Mexican state of Nayarit to California, opened a traditional Mexican restaurant in the LA neighborhood of Echo Park, and subsequently sponsored many more Mexican immigrants in her life.
The book does a decent job getting into the history of the Nayarit restaurant and the people that were a part of it (whether they were employees or customers), but it does seem a little too short. The actual text ends around 130 pages before the official page count ends, those pages being entirely citations, indices, and appendices. I understand the need for citations in a nonfiction book, but it feels like the author only scratched the surface of her grandmother's story in less than 200 pages. I would have preferred a longer text, understanding it would mean slightly longer citations (even adding 100 pages of narration to the book with a couple extra citation pages would give us closer to a 70-30 split versus the 60-40 split it currently has).
The book does a decent job getting into the history of the Nayarit restaurant and the people that were a part of it (whether they were employees or customers), but it does seem a little too short. The actual text ends around 130 pages before the official page count ends, those pages being entirely citations, indices, and appendices. I understand the need for citations in a nonfiction book, but it feels like the author only scratched the surface of her grandmother's story in less than 200 pages. I would have preferred a longer text, understanding it would mean slightly longer citations (even adding 100 pages of narration to the book with a couple extra citation pages would give us closer to a 70-30 split versus the 60-40 split it currently has).
February 1, 2023
An excellent and insightful book about immigration, race, food, and the development of Los Angeles. The author is a USC professor and MacArthur fellow. Her grandmother founded and built the Nayarit, a restaurant in Echo Park that was a center point for supporting immigrants from Mexico, a restaurant central to the development of Mexican food in the US, and a location in Echo Park emblematic of the intersection of diverse elements of the developing city driven by immigrants, film stars, LGBTQ people, working and middle class whites. The proprietor of my favorite Los Angeles Mexican Restaurant, Barragan’s, got started with seed funding and support from Nayarit. This was a compelling history. I looks forward to reading more from this author
May 19, 2025
As someone who lives in Echo Park and has witnessed the neighborhood transform year after year, namely the replacement of working-class spaces by upscale boutiques and cafes, I really appreciated this book. Molina captures something rarely discussed: the erosion of third places that knit communities together. As Molina shows, these are not just businesses, they are memory, culture, and belonging. I hope this book sparks serious conversation about how we preserve these spaces. Commercial displacement is a form of erasure that's been left out of mainstream narratives for much too long. Our neighborhoods are suffering for it.
October 10, 2025
This was fascinating. I picked it up on our trip to LA a couple weeks ago. It’s about gentrification and placemaking in the Echo Park area. The author talked about how her grandma started the Nayarit and how that was a way to connect Mexican immigrants in LA. I also learned about how Dodger Stadium area used to be a neighborhood and how the people got displaced. Reading this after seeing all the changes around York and Figueroa even in the 4 years or so I’ve been visiting that area of LA was really helpful. I want to find books about the area of Oakland I live in and learn the history of the place….
April 22, 2023
A really unique book. Partially a (slight hagiographic) tribute to the author’s grandmother. But it also does a great job describing the history of LA, in particular the unique diversity of Echo Park in an era of segregation. And it talks about immigration from Mexico. And culinary history. And the way immigrants band together to create community.
It’s many things at once, and always rich, well researched, and readable.
It’s many things at once, and always rich, well researched, and readable.
June 11, 2023
A fascinating look at community and how a restaurant in Echo Park, the Nayarit, played such a critical role in building culture and support for Mexicans coming from Nayarit. Also has given me pause about how a restaurant can be more than a trendy hot spot, but a life line and place of opportunity and support for immigrants.
January 20, 2023
Interesting enough read of a few hundred pages, that seemed to drift off into related, or at times unrelated but mostly interesting stories of the Nayarit restaurant and surrounding community of Los Angeles.
March 7, 2023
very informative read though i do wish there were deeper personal connections between molina and doña natalia instead of just information thrown at the readers
March 12, 2023
As a Los Angeles Native, I enjoyed reading about my (Mexcian) people's history in the city I love. It was very interesting to see how the city and culture has evolved.
April 11, 2023
Rich history of cultural anchors for Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles.
June 1, 2024
Read for a class but was interesting to learn about the history of the echo park community.
January 22, 2025
A fantastic read on a lovely history and the importance of community, while also giving you the emotional gut punch of how American capitalism is destroying cultural hubs.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews