SOURCE: "Langston Hughes in Mexico and Cuba," in Latin American Literature and Arts, Vol. 47, Fall, 1993, pp. 23-27.

In the following essay, Mullen argues that Hughes's experiences in Mexico and Cuba had a significant influence on his writing and identity.

In his introduction to Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (Duke University Press, 1990), Gustavo Pérez Firmat underscores the fact that the field of inter-American literary studies is something of a terra incognita. The occasion of the quincentenary, in which so much writing has been directed toward the theme of the identity of the Americas, seems a particularly appropriate juncture to fill in some of the open critical space to which Pérez Firmat refers. The shaping of the American identity has been marked in no small degree by a relatively constant set of discoveries carried out by writers from both sides of the border, from the period...