Hijuelos had just learned he'd won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. It was the first fiction Pulitzer ever to go to a Latino writer.
"When I won the prize," says Hijuelos, speaking by phone from Manhattan, "all I could think of was the mystical feeling, 'You've done your folks right.' "
Yolanda Padilla, assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, calls his Pulitzer "a great point of pride for many Cuban Americans and Latinos generally. And it opened up publishing opportunities for Latino writers because presses on the East Coast saw that there was a demand for stories about Latina/o culture."
Indeed, Hijuelos is thought of as a Cuban American writer - "but the irony of my work, and my life," he says, "is that I was cut off from my Cubanness pretty early, and in some ways, I've had to write my way back to it."
That makes a fine summary of Thoughts, which falls into two parts. In the first, young Oscar is born in Manhattan, to two Cubans recently come to the States. He's a fair-haired kid known as el rubio ["the blond"] to the Cubans around them. He visits Cuba with his mother in 1955, and returns - only to fall ill of a kidney disease, possibly picked up in Cuba. He's forced to spend most of a year in the hospital. That year, surrounded by no Spanish speakers, effectively cuts him off from Cuban culture.
"I was cut off in so many ways from my legacy," he says. "First, by my appearance, because I didn't 'look Cuban.' Then by my disease. And later, the communist revolution cut me off from my relatives." Once well, the young Oscar resists his mother's attempts to reintroduce him to Spanish.
