PROJECT: The Latino Catskills Project

Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (University of Houston) announces the launch of a new digital project, The Latino Catskills, designed to “resituates the rural Catskills region, located 100 miles northwest of New York City, as a generative space of Latino culture and identities” by focusing on the “countless Spaniards, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and others of Latin American descent” who vacationed in the Catskills. From the announcement:

Generously funded by a 2021–2022 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH) Grant-in-Aid, our project seeks to illuminate this important, if understudied, aspect of New York Latino history by building a digitized archive of significant Latino Catskills sites with associated primary sources and material objects. A mapping interface will allow web visitors to plot their own virtual itineraries through the region and explore a trove of cultural materials, including advertisements, brochures, photographs, audio recordings, and relevant news coverage related to the scores of now-defunct resorts, hotels, restaurants, and villas that served as a summer vacation network for a Latino clientele. At a later stage of development, this digital map will also connect to a series of multimedia-rich, thematic “exhibits” that interpret and tell the stories of these sites, objects, and people, from everyday Latino holidaymakers to luminaries such as the Cuban patriot José Martí, the Mexican writer José Juan Tablada, and musical virtuosi like Tito Puente and El Gran Combo, who enlivened the remarkable summer music scene that boomed in the area during the 1950s and ’60s. The digital map and accompanying exhibits will render visible the historical and spatial extension, as well as the cultural richness, of the Latino Catskills, while also broadening Latino geographies beyond their dominant urbanscapes.

Ultimately, “the project aims to recover leisure, rest, and recreation as important social components of the Latino experience that enhance and complement dominant narratives of New York Latinidad, which have traditionally focused on the racialized experiences of urban poverty and toil. Latinos have long contributed to the economic and cultural richness of the Catskills. The Latino Catskills project rightfully reclaims the region’s rugged landscape as part of Latinos’ vibrant history and heritage.”

Keep an eye out for this project’s development and follow the work of Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage.