As of summer 2020, there were 27,556 restaurants in New York City. Of this number, 977 were Mexican restaurants (with 338 in Manhattan, 301 in Brooklyn, 203 in Queens, 126 in the Bronx, and 43 on Staten Island). To those who consider New York to be a culinary epicenter of the nation and world, the presence of Mexican cuisine might not be surprising. But just a few decades ago, New York was a place where Mexican food was hard to find.

I created the Mexican Restaurants of NYC StoryMap with two of my PhD students to offer a visual history of how Mexican cuisine proliferated in New York City’s five boroughs over time - from 1930 to 2020 - and to honor the restaurant owners and workers, bodega and panadería proprietors, and taco truck and pushcart vendors who have made New York a city of many kinds of Mexican food and Mexican people.

Click on the link above to interact with our maps, look at Mexican food businesses past and present, and learn about the ways we want to crowdsource knowledge from our fellow Nueva Yorkers!