Cristina Pérez Jiménez

Cristina Pérez Jiménez is an associate professor of English at Manhattan College specializing in U.S. Latinx and Caribbean studies, race and migration, urban studies, especially NYC, and ethnic social movements. She co-edited Guillermo Cotto-Thorner’s Manhattan Tropics/Trópico en Manhattan (2019) and has published in various journals, including Revista Hispánica Moderna, Small Axe, CENTRO Journal, and Latino Studies, among other venues. She is completing a book, Here to Stay: The Making of Latinx New York, exploring the New York Latinx community in the 1930s and 1940s, while developing an ongoing public digital humanities project, “The Latino Catskills.” The Latinx Catskills is a public digital humanities project that resituates the Catskills region, 100 miles northwest of NYC, as a generative space of Latinx culture and identity. Through multimedia exhibits and an interactive digital map, the project documents little-known stories about the countless Spaniards, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and others of Latin American descent who lived in or vacationed there from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, a period when the Catskill Mountains was one of the nation’s most popular summer destinations. By rediscovering the Latinx presence and contribution to the region, the Latinx Catskill challenges the tendency to make urban environments the dominant context for understanding New York Puerto Rican experiences while also reclaiming outdoor recreation, joy, and leisure as key aspects of Northeast Latinx lives, too often conceived, even deemed valuable, primarily in relation to work and productivity.