Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tiberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

Hello, and welcome to Bookworm. You may notice that I don't sound like Michael Silverblatt.

That's because I'm Evan Kleiman, and I'm thrilled to be filling in for Michael.

My usual beat is as host of KCRW's Good Food, a show that has always gone beyond recipes

to explore larger issues seen through a food lens.

So as guest host of Bookworm, I'm eager to introduce Natalia Molina to you.

She's a distinguished professor in the Department of American Studies and

ethnicity at the University of Southern California. And she's the author of the just-released

book, A Place at the Nairite, How a Mexican Restaurant nourished a community. Hi, Natalia.

Hi, Evan. It's so great to have you. You're an historian of race and immigration. What does that mean? What kind of stories do you cover? And what has been at the heart of your work?

When you're a historian of race and immigration, people always say, what a great time to study history.

But immigration is central to our story of America.

Immigration also teaches us lessons about race, who we think of as insiders or outsiders, and what makes them so in terms of who has access to citizenship, where they can settle in a city,

where they can work, even whom they can marry. And so the idea of citizenship as a tool for

thinking about democracy, inclusion, exclusion, have been at the heart of my work now for over 20 years.

What is often on your students' reading lists?

I teach a lot of classes on Latino studies in general, Latinx studies in general.

...