A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community. By Natalia Molina

Abstract

It’s not often that one reviews a scholarly book and feels the need to promise no spoilers, but Natalia Molina’s A Place at the Nayarit has enough unexpected twists and intriguing real-life characters that readers will want to enjoy just learning how things turn out. This is a microhistory of a restaurant, its creator, its employees, and its clientele—but Molina succeeds in opening the scene outward, pivoting from the hyperlocal to encompass a neighborhood, a city, and ultimately a continent. Molina’s aim is classic social history; she wants to tell stories that most other genres “rarely capture: how marginalized people can create their own places in ways that reclaim dignity, create social cohesion, and foster mutual care.” The ethnic Mexican “placemakers” at the heart of her book, she explains, “were not just putting food on the table or into their mouths. They were creating meaning, establishing links with one another, and… asserting their place in a nation that often seemed intent on pushing them to the margins” (pp. 8–9).