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

by Natalia Molina

The hidden history of the Nayarit, a neighborhood restaurant that nourished its community of Mexican immigrants with a sense of belonging as they made their own places in Los Angeles.

In 1951, Do�a 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 Do�a Natalia--a generous, reserved, and extraordinarily capable woman. Do�a 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Biography, American History, Food, Grad School

454 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 19, 2022

About the author

Dr. 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.

Reviews

[Nor · Rating 3 out of 5]

[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.

[Caroline (readtotheend on IG) · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[JanineWent2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Mary Camarillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[LAPL Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Valeria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good for a monograph. I think Carolina would like this/find it useful.

[Weiling · Rating 4 out of 5]

On Sunset Boulevard, just a block north of Echo Park, the neon on the old sign for the Nayarit has gone dark. It sits above the marquee for a music venue, the Echo. “The yuccas that used to grow out front are gone, the walls covered in flyers.” Pushing through the long-closed door of the flagship restaurant that Doña Natalia Barraza once made an “urban anchor” to many Mexican and Mexican Americans seeking prosperity, Natalia Molina re-electrified the memories of her Spanish-speaking grandmother’s enterprise that spanned nearly half a century (from the early 1920s to the late 1960s), across multiple locations. Married at seventeen, divorced and alone at twenty-one, the Nayarit-native Doña Natalia crossed the border and landed in Los Angeles in 1922, beginning a career what would leave an indelible mark in twentieth-century Mexican immigration history on both sides of the US-Mexico border towards which different classes, but particularly the working class, were gravitated.

Between Hollywood and the Elysian Park, known since 1962 to be the land of Dodger Stadium, Doña Natalia’s restaurants far exceeded the notion of a food scene and became a symbolic and physical site of community that gathered a wide variety of workers and customers, from movie stars and athletes to the most ordinary, impoverished, and marginalized working-class Latinx immigrants. More than a celebratory entrepreneurship story and family lore, Natalia Molina opens every pore of the restaurant to re-enliven the major and minor histories that ran through the spatial, temporal, and emotional dimensions of the Nayarit, against the booming ethnic Mexican population that constituted what the historian Anthony Macías calls the “multicultural urban civility” of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles.

Instead of chasing the spectacle of “transnational” entrepreneurship, Molina, a third-generation Mexican American, pours her researcher’s insight onto the “translocal” connections between Echo Park and the eponymous home state Nayarit, especially the town of Acaponeta. The “minor” focus on the human-scale patria chica (“small country”) allows the historian to expansively present the creative ways in which one restaurant, with an unlikely entrepreneur—a divorced female ethnic immigrant—built infinite ties of diasporic Nayaritas scattered across a violently segregated metropolitan landscape. This focus is sustained by her capacious conceptualization of “place”: a simultaneously physical and affective space where everyday events happen that incubate or realize connections between real people and that create irreducible experiences that function as portals between this one time-space and multiple others. The particularities of place also helps Molina to assert that “had Doña Natalia settled in a predominantly Mexican ethnic enclave (in East Los Angeles), her life would have been very different.”

Centrally, place is at once fluid and concrete, porous and bounded, and always in the making and not fixed. It contains and engenders scales that are at once liveable/lived and extendable/imagined. In the case of the Nayarit, the spatial scales span from each section of the restaurant to Echo Park—a rare, poorly-documented progressive and multi-ethnic community in-between ethnoburbs and white supremacy—to the rest of Los Angeles/Southern California and Nayarit/Mexico. Temporally, folded into the two decades of the Nayarit under Doña Natalia’s supervision (circa 1943-late 1960s) were two centuries of embattled immigration politics in California, from the US-Mexico War (1846-48) and the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) to legalized and extra-governmental racism materialized and spatialized in the sprawling grids of Los Angeles, to the unfolding chapter of gentrification.

Molina captures restaurants as a “semipublic” space, in line with “beauty salons and barbershops, bars and coffee shops, bookstores and bowling alleys.” In contrast to public spaces whose importance has been widely accepted but whose hostility to minorities of all sorts often evades critical intellectual examination, these semipublic spaces are where community members congregate on a regular, sometimes daily basis and sometimes for hours at a time.” In the Nayarit, “countless small acts of everyday life”—including “eating, laughing, gossiping, debating, celebrating, claiming space, bonding”—that are easily disregarded and discarded by metanarratives can be appreciated as forging and sustaining the resilient and imaginative fabric of a community. Key to the cohesion and dynamism of these small acts was Doña Natalia, who was dedicated not only to her family—even Molina’s mother and uncle were her adopted children—but also to “fictive kinships,” an extended intimacy and mutual obligation that “have been integral supports for Mexican immigrants to the United States.” This vast, interconnected, and reciprocal network that routed through Doña Natalia became Molina’s primary source of oral history that allowed her research to fill in the gaps in officially created archives and in newspapers.

With this dynamic foundational understanding of place, Molina builds two interlocking frameworks to characterize the historic momentum that the Nayarit/Doña Natalia “cooked up”: place-making and place-taking. Molina writes of place-making: “The kinds of spaces created, how they were used, the relationships that sprang from them, and the nurturing of collectivity and inclusivity they enabled resulted in a placemaking that could be resistant and oppositional—a counter to dominant spatial formations and imaginaries.” Relationally, place-taking offers a view of ethnic minorities and gender non-conforming individuals navigating and negotiating their rightful presence in unwelcoming spaces of the city, confronting discrimination while claiming the right to fun and visibility. This framework tackles the “the popular picture of the immigrant experience is built on the stereotype of people who kept their heads down, worked hard, and sacrificed their own lives for the betterment of their children.”

Without negating the loaded truthfulness of this portraiture, the lens of place-taking expands the picture of how life is lived and how places become liveable. Thanks to Doña Natalia’s extended social network that crucially included her more privileged cultural brokers in law, government, entertainment, journalism, and even law enforcement, the Nayarit workers were able to enjoy “more structured opportunities for place-taking” than their compatriots living in the Latinx ethnoburb in East Los Angeles as well as other ethnic (Black, Indigenous, Asian, Jewish) groups. Either secured by or cherishing these precious and precarious opportunities, the Nayarit workers did not get involved in political movements like other members of their own and other ethnic groups. Yet, their existence (place-making) and persistence (place-taking) were in themselves a politically charged manifesto against white supremacy and US imperialism.

Doña Natalia passed away two years before Natalia Molina was born. Researching the Nayarit from the mid-2010s onward could feel, at least partially, like nostalgia’s work. If that was true, Molina did not let nostalgia overwhelm her academic and personal dedication. The ethnographic research process allowed her the opportunity to dine and interview in the restaurants seeded by the Nayarit’s economic, professional, and/or socio-cultural capital, a flavorful and blissful activity that in itself reinvigorated old relationships. On the more bleak side, Covid-19 and ongoing gentrification hit the working-class ethnic Mexican population particularly hard, deepening the abyss of public health, housing, and small business crises and paving way for corporate developers and bankers to sweep Echo Park and beyond. None of the struggles that underwrote the Nayarit workers’ lives in the early to mid-twentieth century have been eased; the opposite may be more true.

The current reality has the book’s epilogue land on the sad, crestfallen note of “losing places.” But loss, as bitter and regretful as it can be, is the strongest and most lasting footnote of the restaurant being a historic landmark of Mexican immigration, labor, and entrepreneurship that lean toward their Indigenous roots far more than their colonial Spanish echelon. “I like to imagine her setting her place and enjoying the sheen and the color of those dishes,” the granddaughter/historian writes, “not just as a sign of aspiration, but also as a way of embracing the place where she lived and asserting her belonging.” Could we say to write a book like this is to rescue a nearly lost history? Sure. It saved traces of minor histories that have faded and scattered and that might never enter an official archive. But beyond preservation (and certainly not the fantasy of restoring and essentializing the full picture of a past glory, which clearly defeats the purpose of understanding “place”), what this book offers is a well-informed alarm to not look away from what is yet fully gone. A darkened neon sign, a less diverse park, a food cart that never gets financed to become a restaurant, or (perhaps more legendarily) a burial of an umbilical cord under a baseball plate…they are the specters living in their canceled future that we call the “present.” Their unfinished assertion of belonging remains in the places that they made and took and that were taken from them. The layered urban future will always be a ghost story that reimagines, reclaims, and resurrects the undead.

[David Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Jeff]

A fantastic interaction of imagrant culture and history with a personal family story of the author. Loved by this Angeleno.

[clancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

repetitive and much more academic than i expected

[jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[Allison T · Rating 5 out of 5]

review from class discussion (we read intro and chapters 1-3 for class)
I loved the storytelling and heart that went into writing this book, enhanced by the fact that the author is telling the story of her own grandmother, piecing together parts of her life despite institutional under-documentation of marginalized communities. Molina paints a rich story of the huge variety of people who called the Nayarit restaurant home at all times of day, who felt safe to unmask and express their identities fully when they were seen as pure laborers in the outside world. Molina uses dozens of interviews to capture the feeling of the place so vividly, and this inspires me to interview my community more.

While reading, I thought a lot about my life in Bushwick before beginning this program. We lived next to Maria Hernandez Park, a gathering space for the entire neighborhood. Especially on weekends, you’ll see the whole field full of people playing Ecuadorian volleyball, dogs in the large and small dog runs, and people sun bathing or reading and skating in the park center. To me, places for play, like the Nayarit, are special places that free people to be themselves, shedding external labels. The park strikes me as a similar environment to the Nayarit, where many different groups come together and take up public space freely.

I found another Bushwick resident who spent a few weeks conducting a visual ethnography experiment on Ecuadorian volleyball in the park, taking 20 visits to the park and interviewing people while trying Ecuadorian food. In fact, researching farther, ecuavolley is found in almost every NYC borough, as well as around the world. Like the Nayarit serving as a nexus for mutual aid for Mexican immigrants, the Ecuavoley community and its tournaments are spaces for support and mutual aid. They also bring together other parts of Ecuadorian culture, such as local dance and music, hoping to educate younger generations.

[Jacob Yungman · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[PATRICK · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a book club pick in 2025, I've read the first 100 pages of it, and I finished the last 80 today at a cute tea place here in where-I-live.

There's a reason I wanted to come back to this. Most of the time, for that book club, they pick theory-heavy, history-heavy, or legislation-heavy books, so I never finish them all the way. But this one I wanted to come back to.

Microhistory is such a fascinating idea to me--a place, a region, or a person's history that create other people's histories--I don't think we've read enough of it. This book is about how a Mexican restaurant in Echo Park in Los Angeles became home to people from the Nayarit, how it served immigrants and served the community around it, nourished it, and the author too (who is the granddaughter of the owner).

I don't think I can articulate how great this book is but here's what I can say, it made me want to write about the history of gay people of where I live. History is all about people--ordinary people, not the presidents or the people who died for our sins, but people who worked everyday and showed up for people without fail. I think to me, that's fascinating. ANyway,....

[Deyab Ratedane · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Erika · Rating 3 out of 5]

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).

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Plum · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Aditya Palacharla · Rating 4 out of 5]

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….

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Laura Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Thomas P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[k · Rating 4 out of 5]

a couple of points i would've liked to see expanded on (parts of chs 3 and 4 felt out of place) but i really loved this study and its place in immigrant-restaurant-community building historiography. a wonderful read!

[Anthony Kargoll · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fine - I'm not usually a fan of microhistory and this book didn't do much to change that. That's not to say the book wasn't good - it did what it needed to and it was successful. The discussions of place, place making, and ideas around that were very well discussed. Strong oral history. Solid book.

[figgy · Rating 3 out of 5]

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

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Emmanuel Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rich history of cultural anchors for Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for a class but was interesting to learn about the history of the echo park community.

[Jarred Luján · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.