Name: Natalia Molina
Title: Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies
Email: nmolina@ucsd.edu
Campus Address: Social Sciences Building (SSB) 226
Phone: (858) 822-1580

Education:
Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2000
M.A., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1996

Field of Expertise:
In her first book, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939, Molina explored ways in which race is constructed relationally and regionally. She argued that race must be understood comparatively. Her current book project, Racial Amnesia: The Search for a Usable Past, extends that argument to a different site, immigration. She investigates how Americans from various regions and disparate backgrounds went about creating and understanding racial categories during a period of peak immigration in the early twentieth century.

Regions of Interest: Mexico, United States

Media Interview Topics: Professor Molina is an expert on comparative ethnicities, Latina/o history, and public health attitudes toward immigrants.

Selected Publications:
Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940. University of California Press, 2006.

"Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the Early Twentieth Century United States." Radical History Review, December 2005.

"Inverting Racial Logic: How Public Health Discourse and Standards Racialized the Meanings of Japaneze and Mexican in Los Angeles, 1910-1924," in Racial (Trans)Formations: Latinas/os and Asians Remaking the United States. Duke University Press, 2006.