The Latino Catskills is a digital project resituating the rural Catskills region, located 100 miles northwest of New York City, as a generative space of Latino culture and identity. The project tells little-known stories about the countless Spaniards, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and others of Latin American descent who lived or vacationed in the region from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, a period when the Catskill Mountains served as one of the nation's most popular summer destinations. These Latino travelers took day trips (known as giras), or stayed at private dwellings and the many resorts owned or managed by fellow Spanish speakers, which offered affordable accommodations with typical “Latin” amenities, including traditional foods, drink, and musical entertainment, and opportunities for leisure and outdoor recreation, all of which contributed to shaping Latino social life and establishing the coordinates of what we have conceived of too often as exclusively urban identities.

By recovering the longstanding Latino presence in the Catskills, our project challenges the tendency to make the city the preeminent, even the sole, context for understanding Latino life in the Northeast.

Project Team

This project is co-directed by Cristina Pérez Jiménez, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English at Manhattan College, and J. Bret Maney, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Lehman College and The CUNY Graduate Center. Please contact us at cperezjimenez01@manhattan.edu or bret.maney@lehman.cuny.edu.

We are indebted to the pioneering work and advocacy of Ish Martinez, author of Las Villas of Plattekill and Ulster County. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the US Latino Digital Humanities Program and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Image Rights

Most photographs on the Latino Catskills website are used with the expressed permission of their creators, owners, or other caretakers (for example, a library or archive). Other images on the site are used in accordance with the "fair use" doctrine defined in 17 U.S. Code § 107. If an individual or organization believes that an image is used in violation of copyright law, please contact us to request its removal.

Privacy Policy

When you use the Latino Catskills website, we collect basic information that your browser or device sends to us that is called Log Data. This Log Data may include information such as your computer’s Internet Protocol (IP) address, browser or device version, content that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages, and other statistics. If you have any questions or suggestions about our Privacy Policy, please contact us.