1990 Pulitzer Prize Review: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos

“It was a Saturday afternoon on La Salle Street, years and years go when I was a little kid, and around three o’clock Mrs. Shannon, the heavy Irish woman in her perpetually soup-stained dress, opened her back window and shouted into the courtyard, ‘Hey, Cesar, yoo-hoo, I think you’re on television, I swear it’s you!’” (opening line).

In 1949, Cesar Castillo and his brother Nestor make the journey from Havana, Cuba to New York City where they form a Latin ensemble called “The Mambo Kings” and quickly make their rise in popular music. This is a terse summary of key elements in the plot of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, however the novel is actually told as a somber, even sorrowful, string of memories by a sixty-two-year-old Cesar Castillo, who in his later years has turned to drinking, smoking, suffering from bad dreams, “and, despite all the women he took to bed, found his life of bachelorhood solitary and wearisome.” He sits in his dingy hotel room at the Hotel Splendour on 125^th Street and Lenox Avenue, not far from the recording studios of Orchestra Records where the Mambo Kings once recorded their successful fifteen 78s, listening to records and reliving the glory of his youth –his insatiable sexual prowess and musical talent.

“…they were musicians and songwriters who had left Havana for New York in 1949, the year they formed the Mambo Kings, an orchestra that packed clubs, dance halls, and theaters around the East Coast –and, excitement of excitements, they even made a fabled journey in a flamingo-pink bus out to Sweet’s Ballroom in San Francisco, playing an all-star mambo night, a beautiful night of glory, beyond death, beyond pain, beyond all stillness” (3)

He remembers growing up in the small town of Las Piñas in the sugar-mill town of Oriente, Cuba before making his way to Havana with his brother, Nestor, to embark on a musical career. In many ways, the two brothers are the polarities of one another. Nestor is a more quiet and docile figure, a melancholic “gallego,” who is often depicted as a tortured romantic. He falls madly in love with a young woman named María, whom he rescues from an abusive man, and they engage in a wild torrid affair, having sex everywhere. In contrast, Cesar is a larger-than-life, cock-of-the-walk macho man who is gregarious and playful, always living in the moment, and plowing through more women than he can count. His advice to his amorous brother is to start treating María poorly, even abusing her, so that she comes to know her place in their relationship. “‘You want a good piece of advice, brother?’ Cesar would tell Nestor. ‘If you want a woman, treat her good sometimes, but don’t let her get too used to it. Let her know that you are the man. A little abuse never hurt a romance. Women like to know wo’s the boss’” (103). But after Nestor does so, María runs away, back into the arms of her former boyfriend, the man who abused her before Nestor rescued her, and she marries him. Tormented and abandoned, Nestor spends the rest of his life heartbroken, writing letters and songs to María, including The Mambo Kings’ biggest hit, a romantic bolero he rewrites twenty-two times called “Bella María de Mi Alma (Beautiful María of my Soul) –“A song about love so far away it hurts; a song about lost pleasures, a song about youth, a song about love so elusive a man can never know where he stands; a song about wanting a woman so much death does not frighten you, a song about wanting that woman even when she has abandoned you” (142).

For Nestor, “the more he thought about her, the more mythic she became” and his fantasy of María takes over his life –“he was the man plagued with memory, the way his brother Cesar Castillo would be twenty-five years later, the man with the delusion that the composition of a song about María would bring her back.” He is haunted by the fact that María told him “I will love you forever” as he gazes longingly of the only picture he has kept of her and hasn’t destroyed (she is in a bathing suit emerging out of the water) and he also pores over Forward America!, a self-help book he hopes will help him feel more positive about life again.

Before coming to America, Cesar also found love of a kind in Cuba, as well. As a young man, he impregnated Luisa Garcia and married her, but things inevitably went awry when he simply could not stop treating her poorly and sleeping around with prostitutes, so he abandoned his daughter Mariela behind in Cuba, determined never to look back, but always look forward, chasing after the hedonistic pleasures of the moment, like women, food, alcohol, and parties. Notably, this lifestyle flies in the face of sage advice he was once given by his gentlemanly Cuban band leader back in Havana, Julian Garcia (father of his estranged wife Luisa), who said: “a family and love, that’s what makes a man happy.” This reflection sets up an interesting contrast within the character of Cesar –a deep tension between the urge to finally settle down with his family contra his bottomless desire for sex and booze.      

When the Castillo brothers arrive in New York City (as inspired by other trailblazing Cubans who made it in America), Oscar Hijuelos paints a vivid portrait of mid-century New York, its immigrant communities of German, Latin, and Irish descent (the brothers first live in a tenement building thanks to their cousin Pablo located at 500 La Salle west of 124^th Street and Broadway in uptown Manhattan). It is a busy bustling world of hard day work and sweaty crowded underground dance floors ready for the rise of the American mambo craze in the 1950s. But this world is not without its darker underside –despite appearing white, the Cubano Castillo brothers are still met with their fair share of xenophobia, particularly when they travel across middle America with their band, though none face worse prejudice than black musicians.

The Mambo Kings initially begins as a series of simple jam sessions mainly organized to drive their Irish landlady, Mrs. Shannon, and other neighbors, mostly Irish and German, crazy. They come up with the name “Mambo Kings” one day while scouring the pages of The Brooklyn Herald. And despite the fact that they don’t read music, the brothers manage to hire an elegant music man Miguel Montoya, who significantly helps them elevate their profile. The Mambo Kings quickly start playing bigger clubs and fancier events, donning their matching white silk suit, with a blurry parade of women always in tow. But the crux of their success comes when they are introduced to fellow Cuban-American, Desi Arnaz, who immediately takes a liking to The Mambo Kings and invites them to perform on the I Love Lucy show. Naturally, they perform “Beautiful Maria of my Soul” and it becomes a pivotal moment in their lives.      

Along the way, despite never recovering from the loss of María, Nestor dates a fellow Cubana emigre named Delores “Delorita.” Delores has a somewhat troubling life –she came to the United States with her licentious father (her mother refused to come along) and once in American, all he seems to want to do is get drunk and goes out at night with tramps. Yet Delores is confused by soft sexualized feelings she has for her father. She is often a lonely bookworm, but when she does go out at night, she is abused and sexually assaulted by a young man before she falls in with Nestor. And when Delores becomes accidentally pregnant, Nestor does the honorable thing and marries her. They go on to have two children together –Eugenio and Leticia—even though Delores longs for an academic career and Nestor continues to descend into a depressive haze, often remarking: “sometimes I don’t feel long for this world.”

Cesar, on the other hand, rejects any hint of marriage in his life: “he lived for that life of fleshy distraction” (197). In fact, much of the novel concerns Cesar’s wild, rapacious sexual conquests –bedding an endless line of women like the “luscious and long-legged” party girl Vanna Vane, or unidentified girls like Paulita, Roxanne, and Xiomara, or Dahlia Munez “the Argentine Flame of Passion,” as well as nameless bohemian girls from Greenwich Village who do not wear brassieres, and young mothers whom he abuses like Lydia. From chorus girls to spinsters, Cesar’s thirst for sex is seemingly unquenchable. His mind incessantly dwells on women with huge breasts, big hips, tall blondes with big heart-shaped asses, fantasizing about their “juiciest valve,” glaring at the panty lines on their dresses, imaging their crotches, nipples, and pubic hair. There are lengthy passages scribed ad nauseum throughout the novel which intimately describe Cesar’s “big thing,” or his “pinga,” likened to a vine, a tree branch, the Mississippi river, a Cortland Apple and so on. His testicles are compared to big California plums. It really becomes tired and just plain ridiculous –bordering on grotesque– halfway through the book. Yet still, we are subjected to scene after scene of Cesar’s fingers probing for oral and anal sex, licking a woman’s “rump” through her curvaceous buttocks, discovering moles in secret places, fantasizing about “pear-bottomed, sweaty-thighed Negresses with silky interiors,” abusive sex with prostitutes, scenes of rape, masturbation, and seemingly every other sexual act under the sun. In later life, we are informed that his “pinga” is still enormous, despite now being “lackadaisical,” stretched out like a “dozing mutt.” Maybe I’m becoming an old Victorian prude, but the excessiveness of it all really detracts from the novel in my view. Is Oscar Hijuelos intending to celebrate stereotypes of Latin masculinity with all these passages? Or is he, instead, providing a critique of machismo?

Regardless, at some point the music ends for everybody and for The Mambo Kings it occurs on a fairly ordinary evening during a drive home with Nestor at the wheel. While Cesar and Vanna Vane are ‘messing around’ in the backseat, Nestor suddenly loses control of the car and crashes. The impact crushes a little vein near his heart, which instantly kills him: “Nestor had been quiet for a long time, paying more attention to the road than to the kissing behind him, when he thought to ask, ‘Would you like me to turn up the heat?’ But then, just like that, the car began swerving and slid over a patch of ice and he panicked, hitting the brakes and jerking the wheels so that the DeSoto flew into a dense wood and crashed into the trunk of a massive oak. There was a boom and then a loud yawning sound, like a ship’s mainmast cracking, and the sturdy V-8 turbo-thrust engine tore loose from its bolts and slammed the steering wheel into Nestor’s chest… And that was all. He passed out behind the wheel, letting out a deep sigh” (183).

The tragic death of Nestor leads to the spiraling decline of his brother Cesar, who descends further into alcohol, smoking, even more abusive sex, while he grows rude and distant from his friends. Eventually, he is asked to leave his band The Mambo Kings and he returns to Cuba for a spell where he learns that his ex-wife Luisa has remarried. He sees his daughter again and has an emotional reunion with his mother along with a visit to his formerly violent father Pedro (the embodiment of machismo). Cesar then goes back home to New York, unaware that he will never see his parents in Cuba again as the U.S. will soon enact the Cold War embargo and a travel ban against Cuba. Cesar then wanders a bit, working a variety of oddjobs: on a ship, traveling around the world, as a music teacher for kids, and later he becomes the superintendent of his building. His life gradually becomes a sad purgatorial existence, and his nephew Eugenio takes care of him from time to time, watching his uncle sit for long stretches staring into the burning embers of his fireplace – “What did he see in these ashes? The harbor of Havana? The fields of Oriente? His dead brother’s face floating amid the burning junk?” (235). The novel wanders a bit here as Cesar invests in and begins running a night club called “Club Havana,” for this he goes into business with a friend named Perez, but the club soon runs into trouble and becomes a haven for selling drugs. Cesar eventually backs out and Perez takes over, changing the name a couple times, before he dies. From this point, many of Cesar’s old friends start to pass away, including his former bandmate Miguel Montoya, who reappears with the promise of reviving Cesar’s musical career before he suddenly dies, and Rene and Elva (a young couple hired by The Mambo Kings to perform as dancers) have an argument ending in Rene being stabbed to death and Elva hurling himself out a window. The end of the Golden Age of Mambo is meeting its fateful demise.

In the community, Cesar comes to be regarded as an aging colossus, the once great Mambo King, whose health troubles have led to numerous hospital visits. He is warned by doctors of his imminent death if he does not immediately change his diet, smoking, and drinking habits. However, Cesar refuses to change. He becomes subsumed by a flood of memories, many of them somber, of loss and perhaps even regret. Despite wondering what his life could have been had he stayed with his wife and daughter in Cuba, he seems more regretful of not being able to return to those wild mambo parties of the 1950s, remembering all the women he slept with. He longs to return to just one of their bedrooms again. But he knows he cannot ever go back to that dreamy, sunny, idyllic time in his life. As his body grows achy and bloated, he begins preparing his final goodbyes. He has a final conversation with his daughter after missing her performance in Canada, and he bids farewell to his nephew Eugenio in a strip club: “Well, don’t forget about me, huh? And don’t forget that your uncle loves you.”

Then, Cesar dies one evening with a drink in hand, song lyrics in the other, and a tranquil smile on his face. His final thoughts are of fantasizing one final time about sex with Vanna Vane:

“Now, in his room in the Hotel Splendour, the Mambo King watched the spindle come to the end of the ‘The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.’ Then he watched it lift up and click back into position for the first song again. The clicking of the mechanism beautiful, like the last swallow of whiskey… When you are dying, he thought, you just know it, because you feel a heavy black rag being pulled out of you… And he knew that he was going, because he felt his heart burning with light. And he was tired, wanting relief… He started to raise the glass to his lips but he could raise his arm no longer. To someone seeing him there, it would look as if he were sitting still. What was he thinking in those moments?… He was happy. At first, things got very dark, but when he looked again, he saw Vanna Vane in the hotel room, kicking off her white high heels and hitching up her skirt, saying, ‘Would you do me a favor, honey? Undo my garters for me?’… And so he happily knelt before her, undoing the snaps of her garters, and then he slid her nylons down and planted a kiss on her high thigh and then another on her buttock, where the softest skin, round and creamy, peeked out from her panties, and he pulled them down to her knees and with his majestic ravaged visage between her legs he gave her a deep tongue-kiss. And soon they were on the bed, frolicking as they used to, and he had a big erection and no pain in his loins, so big that her pretty mouth had to struggle with the thick and cumbersome proportions of his sexual apparatus. They were entangled for a long time and he made to her until she broke into pieces and then a certain calm came over him and for the first time that night he felt like going to sleep” (394-395, Cesar’s final thoughts as he is dying).

---

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love presents a moving portrait of two brothers in the age of mambo, an era rich with the musical traditions of rumba, mambo, cu-bop, and others, as well as the influence of jazz greats like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who are referenced at various points in the novel (indeed there are a handful of helpful notes peppered throughout the book which gives it the feel of a work of historical fiction – one in particular that stood out to me was a little aside about a drug deal and the shootout that killed a musician named Chano Pozo). Take altogether, Oscar Hijuelos vividly captures the image of a big mambo band, with its full congas, trombones, flute, stand-up bass, saxophones, trumpets, singers, and a grand piano. And in many ways the whole novel is intended to mirror a Mambo Kings black brittle 78 record, with part one being titled “Side A: In the Hotel Splendour 1980” and part two being “Side B: Sometime later in the night in the Hotel Splendour.” Of course, the bulk of the novel is bookended by a brief prologue and epilogue narrated by Eugenio, son of Nestor and nephew of Cesar. perhaps we might rightly consider him the true narrator of the novel. In a brief coda entitled “Toward the end, while listening to the wistful ‘Beautiul Maria of My Soul’” Eugenio makes a surprise visit to Desi Arnaz in Los Angeles. While out there, Desi invites Eugenio over to his house where they chat mindlessly for a few minutes, but when Desi gets up to conduct some business, Eugenio has a stark hallucination in which his father and uncle have been reincarnated and are seated on the couch across from him, smiling and happy, as real as flesh and bones.

“Popp, but I’m glad to see you.”
“It is the same for me, son. It will always be the same.”

This struck me as a surprisingly powerful close to The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, an emotionally gripping portrait of an age that has long since vanished, along with all the people who made it great. Despite all the obscene depictions of extreme self-indulgence (primarily by Cesar), Oscar Hijuelos manages to make the reader yearn for a revival of the 1950s mambo world, as if to hold onto it again for just a little while longer. As I read the novel, I wondered the extent to which Hijuelos intends to present a critique of the American Dream –in The Mambo Kings is he suggesting the American Dream is merely an invitation to pure hedonism? Or is he offering a critique of Old World traditionalism by showing the insufficiency of a character like Julian Garcia’s praise of love and family back in Cuba? I suppose these questions hinge on our interpretation of Cesar Castillo. Is he a remorseful character, regretting his empty life wasted in pursuit of animalistic pleasures? Or in his advanced age is he still just an inflamed lusty young bachelor in his heart? Cesar’s nostalgia-filled memories show us the impossibility of his one-time intention to live presently without ever looking backward –a man like Cesar cannot live in the moment forever. Perhaps this question of the American Dream is best exemplified in the little self-help book called Forward America! that Nestor takes to heart. When he dies, Cesar inherits the book (much like the way that he inherits his brother’s pining, lugubrious outlook on life).

At any rate, with his 1990 Pulitzer Prize win, Oscar Hijuelos became the first Hispanic/Latino author to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and in the year of the book’s release, it received considerable praise. In The New York Times Book Review, Joseph Cincotti dubbed Hijuelos’s unique historical cultural examination in The Mambo Kings as “literary archaeology, sifting through the remains of a vanished musical and ethnic heritage traced back to Oriente Province in Cuba, from which his parents emigrated.” Whereas Hijuelos, himself, says “Archeologists have their heads in the clouds, and those clouds are 3,000 years old… I’ve been wandering around 1952 for a long time, taking walks down memory lane, even if it’s not my memory… Originally, I wanted to write a book about a building supervisor who had once been a musician… Then I became interested in the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern aspect of walk-on characters in ‘I Love Lucy.’ From talking to people who knew him I get the impression that for a lot of these bit parts, Desi Arnaz just hired his friends.”

And in a 2023 introduction to the book (later republished by Lithub), Ann Patchett fondly remembered reading it for the first time. Her reflections are warm and worthwhile for readers; part of her essay is quoted below:

“The past is the refrain to the Mambo Kings’ song of love, the continual loop on which the story spins. Nestor looks back to Maria, then Cesar looks back to Nestor. One imagines that even Desi Arnaz, who makes a reappearance at the end as a kindly old man, longs for his earlier days. The novel tells us there were always happier times that had not been fully appreciated despite the continual seizing of life, and those happier days fill the book with longing: for Cuba before Castro, for New York when mambo clubs ruled, for the women and men tricked out in all their finery as they took their place on the dance floor… We are always looking back, and we will forever judge what came before through the lens of our newfound wisdom. The Castillo brothers are looking back, and we are looking back at them, as decades from now others will be looking back at us. Bless the novels that provide accounts of the world that came before.”

---

Notable Quotations

“Nearly twenty-five years after he and his brother had appeared on the I Love Lucy show, Cesar Castillo suffered in the terrible heat of a summer’s night and poured himself another drink. He was in a room in the Hotel Splendour on 125^th Street and Lenox Avenue, not far from the narrow stairway that led up to the recording studios of Orchestra Records, where his group, the Mambo Kings, made their fifteen black brittle 78s. In fact, it could have been the very room in which he had once bedded down a luscious and long-legged party girl by the name of Vanna Vane, Miss Mambo for the Month of June 1954. Everything was different then: 125^th Street was jumping with clubs, there was less violence, there were fewer beggars, more mutual respect between people… Back then, you could walk through the park wearing your best clothes and a nice expensive watch without someone coming up behind you and pressing a knife against your neck. Man, those days were gone forever” (11).

“Sipping whiskey, his memory scrambled like eggs. He was sixty-two. Time was becoming a joke. One day, young man; next day, old man” (12).

“They formed a mambo band; that is, a traditional Latin dance band given balls by saxophones and horns” (24).

“Although Cesar considered himself a singer, he was also quite talented as an instrumentalist and adept at percussion. He was blessed with tremendous energy, a surge of power from too many slaps in the face from his foul-tempered father, Pedro Castillo, and a love of melody because of his mother and the affectionate maid who had helped bring him into the world, Genebria” (24).

“A spectacular evening among so many spectacular evenings. How the rum flowed then, Jesus, how the bottles of booze multiplied along with the thick latex prophylactics and quivering female thighs like the miracle of fish and bread” (31).

“Visas in hand and sponsored by their cousin Pablo, they turned up in New York as part of the wave of musicians who had been pouring out of Havana since the 1920s, when the tango and rumba crazes swept the United States and Europe. That boom had started because so many musicians lost their jobs in pit orchestras when talkies came in and silent movies went out. It was stay in Cuba and starve to death or head north to find a place in a rumba band” (31).

“His (and Nestor’s) songs were more or less typical of the songwriting of that day: ballads, boleros, and an infinite variety of fast dance numbers (son montunos, guararchas, merengues, guaracha mambos, son pregones). The compositions capturing moments of youthful cockiness (“A thousand women have I continually satisfied, because I am an amorous man!’). Songs about flirtation, magic, blushing brides, cheating husbands, cuckolds and the cuckolded, flirtatious beauties, humiliation. Happy, sad, fast, and slow” (39).

“Now as he sat in the Hotel Splendour his life with Luisa fluttered like a black moth through his heart. He felt a great sadness, recalling how in his youth he had never believed that love really existed –for him. But back then, while living in Havana and later strumming a guitar in Pablo’s living room in New York, he just told himself, ‘That’s life,’ dismissing his sadness and bringing down a macho wall between himself and his feelings” (58).

“‘For someone who sings so many songs of love, you are cruel’” (59).

“She liked him, found him a refined kind of man, the kind of poetic soul who would write songs of love. She was nervous, but, right then and there, she decided that she would let him as he pleased with her. There was something she found immensely appealing about his solemn demeanor, his passivity, his pain” (86-87, Delores on Nestor).

“But, generally speaking, he never relaxed for a moment. His moments of release? When his penis exploded with sperm and obliterated his personality, throwing him into a blue- and ed-lit heaven of floating space, and when he played the trumpet and got lost in melody. Otherwise, he didn’t know what to do with himself” (113).

“The brothers loved the immensity of the United States and experienced both the pleasures and the monotony of small towns U.S.A.” (165).

“He remembered those parties they used to have back in the happy days, the tug of the past so powerful. In the living room: tables abundant with food, red-bulbed lamps, piles of records, lines of suave, unruly, boisterous, polite, bashful, arrogant, tranquil, and violent young men spilling out of their apartment and down the stairs past the cooked-cabbage smells of the hallway and into the street, where fights sometimes broke out; while beautiful women turned up in packs with their scents of perfume and sweat in that apartment, the loud record player heard for blocks, the lady downstairs terrified that the sagging floors would fall in, the Irish cops requesting with some hesitation that they turn things down and stop stomping on the floor, and in the early morning the last of the partyers leaving, singing and talking loudly as they made their way down the street” (192).

“The flamboyant Cesar Castillo became a good listener and got the reputation of a man to whom one might tell one’s troubles. His friends who came to visit him were either beset with woes or looking to get something from the ex-Mambo King. Men wanting to borrow money or to pass the night drinking his booze. People on the street and in the clubs who used to talk about what a womanizing and insensitive man he had been before his brother’s death now talked about how, perhaps, this tragedy had helped to reform him into a more noble character. Actually, most people felt sorry for him and wished the Mambo King well” (236).

“Who would ever have dreamed that would be so? That Cuba would be chums with Russia?” (259).

“… the Mambo King began to feel disturbed by what he did not have in this world. He was getting older. He was fifty-four and had been throwing his money away on women, gambling, and friends for years… He had no health insurance, no security, no little house in the Pennsylvania countryside… What did he have? A few letters from Cuba, a wall filled with autographed pictures, a headful of memories, sometimes scrambled like eggs” (308).

“That night he had trouble sleeping, spent hours in tortured thought. Why was he, a cocksure and arrogant macho in his youth, now relegated to fearful thoughts of lifelong loneliness? Why were his knees aching? Why did he feel at times that he walked around with a corpse slung over his shoulders, as if the days after his brother died were somehow repeating themselves?” (314).

---

The 1990 Pulitzer Prize Decision

The three-person fiction jury in 1990 consisted of:

• Chair: Joel Conarroe (1934-2024) was an American arts administrator and professor. He was the head of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from 1983 to 2003 (the third president of the organization). He was also a trusted personal confidant to countless writers, most notably Philip Roth. He previously served as executive director of the Modern Language Association and president of the P.E.N. American Center. He served as a chairman of the National Book Award fiction jury and also the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury and other similar roles. He published analyses of the poetry of William Carlos Williams and John Berryman and edited multiple poetry anthologies, including “Six American Poets,” a widely circulated 1993 survey of works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and others. He received a bachelor’s degree in English from Davidson College in North Carolina in 1956, a master’s degree in English from Cornell University the following year, and a doctorate in English from New York University in 1966. A gay man, he developed a long-term relationship with the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici. He died at age 89 in 2024 due to advanced melanoma.
• Diane Johnson (1934-present) is an American novelist and essayist whose satirical novels often feature American heroines living in contemporary France (she also co-wrote the screenplay for the 1980 film The Shining together with Stanley Kubrick). She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Persian Nights in 1988 (also, Alison Lurie dedicated her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Foreign Affairs to Diane Johnson).
• Philip F. O’Connor (1916-2008) was a short story writer and successful novelist. He was born in San Francisco, California attended St. Ignatius Preparatory School and earned a BS at the University of San Francisco in 1954. During his army service, he was stationed in England and afterward worked as a journalist for the San Francisco News and taught high school English before earning an MA in English from San Francisco State College in 1961 and earned an MFA from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1963. He taught English at Clarkson College of Technology in Potsdam, New York from 1963-1967 and then established the creative writing program at Bowling Green State University, where he spent the bulk of his academic career as director and writer-in-residence. He retired from academia in 1994 and pursued writing full-time. He was a finalist for a National Book Award for “First Novel” in 1980 for his novel Stealing Home; and later publications have claimed his next two novels Defending Civilization and Finding Brendan were both nominated for Pulitzer Prizes (however technically any novel can be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; neither of these novels were Pulitzer Fiction finalists in either 1989 or 1991). According to his obituary, he had seven children, was married twice, and passed away peacefully in his sleep in 2018.

Interestingly enough, this year the jury only elevated two novels for consideration for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The 1990 jury report, which was sent to administrator Robert C. Christopher in December 1989, strongly stated: “The fiction jury unanimously and enthusiastically regards two (and only two) of this year’s eligible titles to be supremely worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.”

The two novels were listed alphabetically, and apparently the board made the final decision. They were: E.L. Doctorow’s eighth novel Billy Bathgate, which was described by the jury as “nearly flawless” and Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which was amusingly misspelled in the report. In the report, the jury wrote:

“Oscar Hijuelo’s [sic] second novel, an exuberant depiction of the Cuban American experience in New York during the 1950s, vividly recreates an era in which the rhythms of Latin jazz filled the nighttime air. Gorgeously written, alternatively comic and deeply moving, The Mambo King Sing Songs of Love [sic] joyfully, gently, and innocently celebrates the lives of two appealing brothers as, far from their native soil, they pursue an American dream.”

---

Who is Oscar Hijuelos?

Oscar Jerome Hijuelos, pronounced “ee-HWAY-los” (1951-2013) was the son of Cuban immigrants. Born in Morningside Heights, New York City in 1951, he grew up on West 118th Street in Manhattan. His father was a cook at the Biltmore Hotel. During a year-long convalescence due to a childhood illness, a kidney infection (acute nephritis) which led to a year in a Connecticut hospital, Hijuelos lost all his knowledge of Spanish, his parents’ native language. “I became estranged from the Spanish language and, therefore, my roots,” he said, though per his obituary in The New York Times, he was said to have been more American-Cuban than Cuban-American.

He attended a variety of schools and community colleges before studying writing at the City College of New York under Donald Barthelme, who became his mentor and friend. He worked various jobs, including working at an advertising agency, and Transportation Displays Inc., before taking up a writing career full-time.

He was the author of nine novels and a memoir. His first novel, Our House in the Last World (1983) follows a family’s travails from Havana in 1939 to Spanish Harlem. With his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (later adapted for the movie The Mambo Kings), Hijuelos became the first Hispanic/Latino to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His third novel The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien (1993) traces several generations of a Cuban-Irish family in Pennsylvania. Hijuelos’s later novels include Mr. Ives’s Christmas (1995) about a man whose life is in tatters after the murder of his son; Empress of the Splendid Season (1999), about a Cuban émigré, once the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do businessman, who has become a cleaning woman in New York; A Simple Habana Melody (From When the World was Good) (2002) which tells the story of Israel Levis, a Cuban composer returning home in 1947 after years of living in Europe, including being imprisoned by the Nazis, who mistook him for a Jew; and Beautiful Maria of My Soul (2010), which serves as a sequel to The Mambo Kings, told from the perspective of Maria. He also wrote a young adult novel entitled Dark Dude (2008), about an introspective Cuban boy living in a tough Harlem neighborhood and a memoir entitled Thoughts Without Cigarettes (2011). A manuscript Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise (2015) was edited and published posthumously.

Hijuelos taught at Hofstra University along with Duke University, where he was a member of the faculty of the Department of English for 6 years before his death (his second wife, Lorie, also taught at Duke). Hijuelos’ first marriage ended in divorce, he later married writer and editor Lori Marie Carlson in 1998 whom I had initially stated helped her husband write The Mambo Kings, however she has since written to me correcting the record: “I did not help my husband write The Mambo Kings. I was helpful to him in that he read pages to me at the beginning stages of its creation. I listened to him read from The Mambo Kings as he began to write it, and I made comments about what I heard.” Together they had homes in Manhattan; Durham, North Carolina; and Branford, Connecticut.

Hijuelos died on October 12, 2013 after suddenly collapsing of a heart attack while playing tennis in Manhattan. He was 62 years old (ironically the same age Cesar is when he dies in the novel). The tennis courts he died on in Riverside Park, New York were later renamed after him. Hijuelos’ Papers are located at Columbia University Libraries and per Hijuelos’s widow, Lori Carlson-Hijuelos, the bulk of his archives are housed at The Library of Congress. In 2022, Library of America released a collected edition of Hijuelos’s work entitled The Mambo Kings & Other Novels.

---

Film Adaptations

• The Mambo Kings (1992)
  • Director: Arne Glimcher
  • Starring: Armand Assante, Antonio Banderas, Cathy Moriarty, and Maruschka Detmers

---

Further Reading

• Beautiful Maria of My Soul (2010)
  • A follow-up novel to The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love which centers on the character Maria Garcia y Cifuentes (the object of Nestor’s love); it retells some of the events of Mambo Kings from her perspective.

---

Literary Context 1989-1990

• 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature: awarded to Spanish writer Camilo José Cela, 1st Marquis of Iria Flavia (1916–2002) “for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man’s vulnerability.”
• 1989 National Book Award Winner: Spartina by John Casey
• 1989 Booker Prize Winner: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1989 was Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy. Other notable bestsellers included The Dark Half by Stephen King, Caribbean by James A. Michener, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, and The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
• 1989 was the infamous year in which the Ayatollah of Iran issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for publishing The Satanic Verses the previous year.
• Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum was published.
• E. L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate was published.
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez published The General in His Labyrinth.
• John Gardner released two more James Bond continuation novels: Licence to Kill and Win, Lose or Die.
• John Grisham published his debut A Time to Kill.
• John Irving published A Prayer for Owen Meany.
• Kazuo Ishiguro published The Remains of the Day.
• John le Carre published The Russia House.
• Dan Simmons published Hyperion.
• Amy Tan published The Joy Luck Club.
• Barbara Kingsolver published The Bean Trees.
• Jose Saramago published The History of the Siege of Lisbon.

---

Did The Right Book Win?

With The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos shows himself to be a wonderful stylist with a flair for both exuberance and tenderness. Yet it’s interesting that the Pulitzer didn’t even consider either A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving nor The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan as contenders for the prize this year. With this in mind, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love strikes me as a satisfactory selection for the Pulitzer Prize, even if I wasn’t entirely enamored with the novel.

---

Hijuelos, Oscar. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, New York, paperback edition published in 2015 (originally published in 1989, 25^th anniversary edition). Hijuelos offers heartfelt thanks to Angel Martinez, Renaldo Ferradas, Chico O’Farrill, and Harriet Wasserman. At the start of the novel, Hijuelos also thanks the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the MacDowell Colony, and the Corporation of Yaddo for the fellowships he was awarded during the writing of this novel.

And Hijuelos includes an epigraph: “…with a flick of your wrist on your phonograph switch, the fiction of the rolling sea and a dance date on a Havana patio or in a smart supper club will become reality. Certainly, if you cannot spare the time to go to Havana or want to revive the memories of a previous trip, this music will make it all possible…” From The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, TMP 1113, Orchestra Records, 1210 Lenox Avenue, New York, New York.