It is about the lives of two Cuban brothers and musicians, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, who immigrate to the United States and settle in New York City in the early 1950s. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990, being the first novel by an American-born Hispanic to do so. It was the basis for a 1992 motion picture, The Mambo Kings, as well as a musical in 2005.