Hijuelos's central male characters all exhibit an excessive desire to escape "the troubles of the world" (Mambo 8):  Alejo Santinio through food and drink; his son Hector through food; his wife Mercedes through nostalgic dreaming; The Mambo Kings through music, sex and food; Nelson through his medicinal concoctions (Fourteen 61); his son Emilio through sex and alcohol (228) and the list goes on.   Where the men are often caught in a permanent, sometimes debilitating, state of nostalgic pain, alleviated momentarily by food, music or sex, the women often escape via reading romances or detective novels or through music as is the case with one of the sisters, Maria, who falls in love when Antoine Rameau sings his aria.  Margarita finds some relief in exploration of her own body and later in familial love and Mariella, the mother, like Mercedes in House gets tangled up in a longing for a Cuban past.  This is often the fate of those women, unlike Delores, who can't adjust.  In Garcia's  Dreaming, we see Felicia enraptured by a sexist Beny Mora record which she plays (as Cesar Castillo does) over and over while she dances in the dark (165).  Felicia lives "on the fringe of life" (184) in a Faulknerian oblivion (a la Emily Grierson).  She forces her son to dance because "everything makes sense when they dance," but when the music stops, she recalls her husband's physical abuse (78).  In practical ways, she is a "Not-mama" to her daughters (121) and she will step over the boundary society has described for her between sanity and insanity.  Cofer's character, Franco Loco, having been attacked by a jealous man with a machete and now completely oblivious to reality, dances a "last dance, hour by hour, day after day," forever frozen ("time had stopped like a dropped clock") in the last pleasurable moment he can recall (Line of the Sun 111).  Often it is music or dance that allows temporary escape from the kinds of borders set up by society to restrain and control one's spiritual or instinctual expression.  For Teresa in Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters, the ability to dance is at least partially a means of expressing her (homosexual and therefore illicit) love for her friend Alicia.  Teresa's lyrics portray how Alicia danced "with such carefree abandon...enveloped...in sweet delusion like a hit of pure cocaine" (77).  Later she describes Alicia dancing with Egberto, her hair giving off an "illusion of innocence" (125).  Despite recognizing that the dance is not reality, Teresa still longs for Alicia "to come out and dance with [her], rid [herself] of one night of memories and heartaches" (125).  In Dreaming in Cuban, as with Rachel's dance of "invented steps" in Woolf's Voyage Out (166), Felicia invents her own music which allows her release from an unbearable domestic relationship.  Before this, her mother Celia, trapped in a similar domestic nightmare with Jorge Del Pino and his family in the house on Palmas street, had dreamed of dancing flamenco in Spain: "she would drink whiskey with tourists...[and] stride through the darkness with nothing but a tambourine" (42).  When Felicia dies, Celia dances on the broken shells at a Santeria ritual in a "mad flamenco" of grief.  Connecting her somehow to an instinctual deliverance, the dance encaptivates her as Nestor's trumpet does or Cesar's sentimental record.  Ultimately, for Cuban-American male characters, submersion in the carnivalesque is usually a rejection of life in the U.S.  When Nestor Castillo dies, he is completing his overall failure to join a generation of Cuban immigrants progressing in America.  He carries around a right wing pamphlet entitled "Forward America" because it contrasts so vividly with the book in his head that takes him back to Cuba.  For Celia in the Garcia novel, the dance is part of her abandoning the material world, but this is not seen as delusionary or negative.  Pilar is an awkward dancer; she dances "like an American" (224) and this deficiency is a barrier between her U.S. self and the rhythms of Cuba.  Thus, toward the end of the novel, when she buys a string base and begins to struggle with rhythm and beat, she is, in essence, reconnecting herself to her African-Cuban heritage, reestablishing an instinctual bond with her country via music.  

            A short story by Helena Viramontes centers around a similar problem.  Aura Rodriguez, a solitary, nearly agoraphobic woman (who, like Felicia, resembles Faulkner's Emily) is moved by the dancing and music of her vagabond neighbors.  She lives in fear of street thugs, hates their music, and never ventures outside "her perimeters." When she sees her neighbors dance with "barefoot freedom," she recalls how at a dance as a 13 year old, her role was to fill the broken toilet with water, and how the dance went on without her (Moths 110).   In this extreme case, Aura's incapacity to "loosen her inhibitions" (110) will, the story suggests, lead to her murdering an innocent person.  In general, for women, music and dance imply freedom from convention, the trap of domesticity, the confinement of marriage or from depression.   This is why Celia in Dreaming in Cuban and Josephina in La Maravilla both have white pianos made in Spain, the country to which their romantic pasts are bound.   In a friend's restaurant called "La Casa" (26), the protagonist of Villanueva's novel senses that a "naked feminine soul was fiercely and finally revealed" by the "uncontrolled ecstasy" (69) of the flamenco (28), creating a "restful ... lull from reality" (31).  "Dancing always seemed to solve the riddle" (137), Villanueva writes, referring no doubt to the riddle of male/female relations.  The dance is often opposed to "proper" society which accounts for Cecile Pineda's sarcasm when, in Love Queen, she speaks of the Tango: "the shocking new steps that made good society act like pimps and whores, and perfectly good whores act like society" (Love Queen 17).   According to the heroine's mother, it is clearly, "the dance of Satan" and therefore highly popular among rebels of the church (41).  But for Ana Magdelena who can "glide sinuously to the captivating strains of the tango" (132) dancing brings her the power "to make everything in the world come to her" (135).    Cisneros writes of a young woman named Marin in The House on Mango Street "under the streetlight, dancing by herself," (28) longing to escape her aunt's rigidity.  Later, Esperanza, the narrator, will be released momentarily from the embarrassment she suffers over her old saddle shoes (representative of her parents' poverty) and dance with her uncle "like in the movies" (46).