Kissing the Mango Tree: Puerto Rican Women Rewriting American Literature

Cultural Writing. Latino/Latina Studies. Feminist Studies. Pioneering novelist and short-story writer Nicholasa Mohr broke onto the literary scene of ethnic autobiography in the early 1970s, but it took another decade for other Nuyorican women to follow the path that she cut. KISSING THE MANGO TREE is the first and only book to examine the works of the most popular Puerto Rican women writers from the perspective of feminist literary criticism. In separate chapters devoted to such writers as Judith Ortiz Cofer, Sandra MarAAa Esteves, Nicholasa Mohr and Esmeralda Santiago, Rivera locates their works within the framework of feminist theory and literature, seeing them as "women with macho asserting their powers to record their own versions of their memories, to own their own bodies." This groundbreaking study is accompanied by a complete bibliography of the six writers' works and secondary sources of feminist, Latino and ethno-poetic criticism and theory.