Dr. Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor and Dean’s Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her influential research examines the interconnected histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. An award-winning author, teacher, and mentor, she has written three acclaimed books: How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts; Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940; and, most recently, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community. The Los Angeles Times called A Place at the Nayarit an “essential Los Angeles book.” It was a finalist for a James Beard Award and received 14 awards and honorable mentions from various organizations. The book chronicles the lives of immigrant workers, including Molina’s grandmother, who became placemakers, nurturing and feeding their communities at restaurants that served as urban anchors.

Professor Molina is currently working on a new book, The Silent Hands that Shaped the Huntington Library: A History of Its Immigrant Workers. Named a USC 2023 Communicator of the Year, she has written for the LA Times, Washington Post, San Diego Union-Tribune, and elsewhere. In 2020, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Before we begin our next major thematic section of the podcast on railroads, we will be looking at the life of Leland Stanford who serves a bridge between the Gold Rush era, the Civil War Era in California government, and the Transcontinental Railroad.

Dorothy Lazard is an American writer, librarian, and public historian based in Northern California.

Her new book is What You Don't Know Will Make a Whole New World. Click here to buy it!

Dorothy grew up in the Bay Area of the 1960s and ’70s, surrounded by an expansive network of family, and hungry for knowledge. Here in her first book, she vividly tells the story of her journey to becoming “queen of my own nerdy domain.” Today Lazard is celebrated for her distinguished career as a librarian and public historian, and in these pages she connects her early intellectual pursuits—including a formative encounter with Alex Haley—to the career that made her a community pillar. As she traces her trajectory to adulthood, she also explores her personal experiences connected to the Summer of Love, the murder of Emmett Till, the flourishing of the Black Arts Movement, and the redevelopment of Oakland. As she writes with honesty about the tragedies she faced in her youth—including the loss of both parents—Lazard’s memoir remains triumphant, animated by curiosity, careful reflection, and deep enthusiasm for life.