Oscar Hijuelos

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Martyn Bone

New Yorker Oscar Hijuelos' bestselling novels are epic family sagas of the twentieth-century Cuban-American experience. His debut, Our House in the Last World (1983), charts the cultural identity crisis of two brothers and their Cuban-born parents in New York during the years after World War II. Pulitzer Prize-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) flamboyantly depicts 1950s New York as a musical, multicultural melting pot. The Irish-Cuban protagonist of The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (1993) is torn between fulfilling the mainstream American Dream of movie stardom and the doting, redeeming love of his all-female family. All of Hijuelos' novels, including even the more understated and contemplative Mr. Ives' Christmas (1995), exhibit a troubled fascination with the cultural hegemony of Hollywood. It is therefore appropriately ironic that the 1992 Warner Brothers production, The Mambo Kings, brought Hijuelos' work to a wider, moviegoing public.