Hispanic Heritage: Oscar Hijuelos Papers Newly Available in the Manuscript Division

This is a guest blog by Barbara Bair, historian of Literature, Culture, and the Arts in the Manuscript Division.

In 1990, author Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013) became the first Hispanic American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989). He later received the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature in 2000. His newly acquired papers are now open for research use in the Manuscript Division Reading Room at the Library of Congress.

The Oscar Hijuelos Papers contain correspondence, notes and notebooks, draft essays, biographical sketches, scripts, screenplays, short stories, speeches, outlines, interviews, photographs, travel material, and other items documenting the writing and teaching careers, family, and personal life of Hijuelos.

Hijuelos was born and raised in the ethnically diverse Morningside Heights neighborhood of West Harlem, the son of émigré Cuban working-class parents. He was educated at Catholic and public schools in the city and attended night school and classes at community colleges before graduating with degrees in English from the City College of New York (1975 B.A., 1976 M.A.). At CCNY he received important mentoring from several professors, including essayist Susan Sontag and short fiction master Donald Barthelme.

His largely autobiographical first novel, Our House in the Last World (1983), was based on his youth and family history. It includes accounts of a pivotal early childhood trip to Cuba, a subsequent illness, and later experiences with relatives in Miami and New York. He framed the novel around the story of his parents’ courtship in Cuba and their coming to America, where they negotiated two cultural worlds. Published by his friend Karen Braziller’s Persea Press, the novel’s critical success as a tale of immigrant experience resulted in Hijuelos receiving the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts in 1985 and resident fellowships at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Hijuelos collection includes a science fiction short story that illustrates his emerging storytelling talent as a young boy. Hijuelos wrote it in 1961 at age ten while a student at Corpus Christi School in New York, and he later featured it as the epigram for his 2011 memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes. A photocopy of the story, entitled “A Trip to the Moon,” is preserved in the collection, reproduced from the original saved by his mother, Magdalena Hijuelos, and later annotated with notes by his wife, writer and editor Lori Marie Carlson-Hijuelos. In the story, Hijuelos imagines a professor rocketing to the moon in the far future (1985!) and proving the hard way that it is not made of green cheese. Written with both humor and pathos, the story foreshadows the “two worlds/different planets” theme of his adult works, which explore doubleness, dislocation, and discovery in immigrant/émigré identity. Also like his later stories, it embraces the value of passion, passage, investigation, and risk.

Hijuelos’s bestselling second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), is the fictional story of two immigrant Cuban musician brothers who play the Mambo scene in New York and make a guest appearance at the invitation of Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz on the I Love Lucy show. The Mambo Kings was further adapted for screen and stage. Hijuelos’s love of music—including jazz, classical, and Latin instrumental and popular song—and of the vibrancy of Latino culture is reflected powerfully in this novel and other works. The musical soundtrack for the 1992 film adaptation included famed Cuban songstress Celia Cruz, bandleader Tito Puente, who was of Puerto Rican heritage and grew up in Spanish Harlem, and other Latin performers.

Hijuelos documented the critical response to the novel and its association with Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball in a scrapbook included in the collection. He also observed, in a handwritten addition to the typed draft of a publicity summary, circa 1993, that “[o]f course it’s about Cubans and music, but I also wanted to do something about the way memory works—like a spinning record, a TV rerun.”

Hijuelos continually returned in his work to universal themes, including love, mysticism, jealousy, friendship, familial relationships, working-class poverty, and loss. He created a body of literature that was quintessentially American as well as Cubano.

The newly available collection is filled with examples of Hijuelos’s thoughts and creative process. It was acquired by the Latin American, Caribbean, and European Division of the Library of Congress in 2023 and transferred to the Manuscript Division that same year, where it was processed and described by archivist Rachel McNellis. Its more than 9,000 items include drafts of Beautiful Maria of My Soul, Hijuelo’s young adult novel Dark Dude, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilo Montez O’Brien, A Simple Habana Melody, the unpublished “So Imagined Mercado” (“Blue Antiquity”), and the posthumously published Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise, as well as many other items in which Hijuelos pays tribute in various ways to his Cuban American heritage. Additional related papers outside the Library of Congress can be found in the collections of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University in New York.

A temporary exhibit titled Hispanic Heritage: Oscar Hijuelos is on view to the public throughout National Hispanic Heritage Month in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. It highlights several items from the Manuscript Division as well as books from the Library’s general collections.

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