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Hi friend,

At the end of the record-breaking season, I had the honor of giving my book to Sr. Jaime Jarrín, Hall of Fame broadcast announcer for the Dodgers, who called the games for us in Spanish, and retired this year after 64 years of service to the Dodgers.  I posted a picture of it, and one of the comments said yes, but given our history with Chavez Ravine, when it comes to the Dodgers, it's complicated. This is my response to that post:
 
As a kid growing up in Echo Park in the 1970s, I would walk to Dodger Stadium with my brother. For three dollars, we could purchase an upper deck seat and for an additional three dollars, we could get a Coke and hot dog. We often ran into food service workers we knew from my grandmother’s restaurant and other local establishments who took second jobs at Dodger Stadium. Some worked the fast food stands—they’d sneak my brother and me free snacks. Others were in more exclusive areas, where they extended the entrée to their friends, giving them complimentary tickets or letting a friend slip in the door when the manager was on a break. 

Access to these spaces gave ethnic Mexican workers and their friends real and imaginative mobility, and at the center of it all, was our love for Los Doyers.

But loving the Dodgers can also be complicated if you’re Latinx.

Dodger Stadium sits where there was once a close-knit, working-class, predominately Mexican and Mexican American residential community called Chavez Ravine. In 1959, to bring Major League Baseball to Los Angeles, the city sold the land to Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, at a fraction of its worth. Ground broke for the construction of Dodger Stadium that year. Residents were evicted, some of them forcibly carried away before bulldozers razed their home.

When I was growing up in Echo Park, I didn’t know this history. I don’t think most people know it today. It is yet another chapter in the history of Latinx disenfranchisement—and yet nowhere else in L.A. do I feel more like an Angeleno, Chicana, or part of the collective human experience than at Dodger Stadium. During a postseason game last year, my seatmate was an L.A.-born Chicano living in the Bay who drove down to be there with his cousins. His family and mine linked arms as the mariachi—playing from the bleachers, surrounded by some of the most loyal Dodgers fans—started playing “Volver, Volver,” and belted out the unofficial Mexican anthem.

Places are made not just by the people who tear down neighborhoods to build stadiums but the people who work in and around the stadium: who play baseball, who come for a sense of community, and who follow what goes on from their radios. History is complicated that way—a rich palimpsest with layers of joy, layers of sorrow, layers of connection, layers of estrangement.
 
You can read the entire essay If you’re Latinx, Loving the Dodgers is Complicated published by Zocalo.

My moment of joy:
 

While my heart is broken 💔 with the Dodgers being out of the postseason, tortillas never let me down.  I had the honor of being a guest judge at Gustavo Arellano’s Great Tortilla Tournament with KCRW Good Food’s Evan Kleinman. More on that in the next newsletter.
#tortillasarelife

Webinar: Underrepresented Voices in the Archive
Huntington curators discuss and highlight the Library's African American, Asian American, Indigenous, and LGBTQ collections, Nov. 10, 2022, 12 p.m.–1 p.m, register via zoom.

One of my great joys in serving as the Interim Director of Research at the Huntington Library is taking people behind the scenes. Don't miss this webinar where Huntington curators Dr. Linde B. Lehtinen, Dr. Karla Nielsen, and Li Wei Yang discuss and highlight the Library's African American, Asian American, Indigenous, and LGBTQ collections. Moderated by your truly. 
 
You will be gobsmacked by what the Huntington has, as I was (pictured here with Huntington curators) when I first saw visiting the Mexican colonial publications written in Nahuatl (1645 and 1683), such as the first dictionary and liturgical texts that blended Catholic and Mexica traditions.
All 2022 proceeds from the sale of my book, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, will go to No Us Without You, a 501c3 charity that provides food relief for the hospitality workers who have been disenfranchised in the pandemic. We share a goal of showing how immigrant workers have sustained the country, and I'm proud to support them. 
 
I have learned much from the good people who have attended A Place at the Nayarit book talks. And I'd love to hear from those whom I haven't met yet or heard from in a while. Please share your thoughts on the book on TwitterInstagram, or leave a review on the platform of your choice.

Until next time,

Natalia

P.S. 
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Natalia Molina
Department of American Studies and Ethnicity
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Los Angeles, CA 90089

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