The former summer home of the major Latino critics and researchers Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez Román, it was built by Juan's mother, Kate Flores, and his father, Angel Flores, himself a major critic of Latin American and world literature.
For decades, Juan Flores (1943–2014) and Miriam Jiménez Román (1951 – 2020), both eminent scholars of Puerto Rican, Latino, and Afro-Latino studies, summered in Palenville, Greene County, New York. They spent their summer months at a serene and secluded property located at the foothills of Kaaterskill Clove, at the end of a dead-end street that led straight into an expansive network of trails in the Kaaterskill Wild Forest. The Kaaterskill Creek runs through the property’s backyard, forming a swimming hole. The house served as an ideal writing retreat for both Flores and Jiménez Román. Away from the teaching and administrative demands of the academic year, their summer house provided a setting in which groundbreaking ideas were developed and field-shaping essays and books were drafted and revised.
Their pioneering Latino-centered scholarship helped transform our understanding of the U.S. Latino experience. Flores, a prolific cultural critic and professor at Hunter College, CUNY, and New York University, is the author or editor of over ten books and many award-winning essays. His work is essential for understanding Puerto Rican diasporic and working-class cultures as well as the dynamic cross-cultural exchanges that shape Latino identities today. Jiménez Román, an indefatigable activist, writer, curator, and founding Executive Director of the Afrolatin@ Forum, was a pioneering architect of Afro-Latino studies. Through her activism and scholarship, Jiménez Román forged new spaces for studying the intersections of Blackness and Latinidad and the operating power of race within and across Latino communities.
Juan Flores’s parents, Angel and Kate Flores, respected scholars and translators who helped establish the field of Latin American studies, had bought the land and built the Palenville house in 1955. After a decade in Mexico and Washington, D.C., working for the Pan American Union, they had moved to New York City for academic appointments and sought a summer retreat that they could call their own. A prolific writer, professor and translator, the Puerto Rican Angel Flores is widely credited as the first to apply the term “magic realism” to Latin American literature. Kate Flores, of Hungarian and Russian descent, was a feminist poet, translator, and editor who developed a novel theory of consciousness and evolution. From their home in Palenville, the Floreses corresponded with towering Latin American writers and critics like Octavio Paz and Julio Cortázar. They also socialized with other intellectuals who summered in the area. Juan Flores remembered, for example, how figures like Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher (who also lodged in Palenville, at the nearby Chestnut Lawn House) would come over for drinks or dinner when he was a young boy.
Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez Román continued this tradition of intellectual conviviality in Palenville. Over the years, they welcomed countless friends and colleagues into their home, treating them to delicious Puerto Rican meals, scenic hikes, and bracing swims in the ice-cold swimming hole out back. But, above all, they offered lively conversation that flowed effortlessly from pressing Latino political and cultural issues to the natural beauty and rich history of the Catskills.
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