Kissing the mango tree : Puerto Rican women rewriting American literature

Kissing the mango tree : Puerto Rican women rewriting American literature

  • Author: Rivera, Carmen
  • Publisher: Arte Público Press
  • ISBN: 9781558853775
  • eISBN Pdf: 9781611921915
  • Place of publication:  Houston , United States
  • Year of publication: 2002
  • Pages: 208

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 Puerto Rican women writers in the United States to follow the path that she cut. From the late 1970s on, a dynamic group of these writers have expanded the landscape of American literature.
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 dedicated to each of these writers, the author locates their works within the framework of feminist theory and literature, seeing them as ""women with macho asserting their creative powers to record their own versions of their memories, to own their own bodies. . . They transform the way we look at the process of growing up and becoming a woman, at the relationship with our mothers and our daughters, at the fluidity of our lives, at our notions of nationhood . . .""
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.

  • Cover
  • Title page
  • Copyright page
  • Contents
  • Preface
  • Introduction. Female Invisibility and Literary Representations of Puerto Ricans in the United States
  • Chapter 1. Esmeralda Santiago and the Bilungsroman of El Barrio
    • Between “puta” and “pendeja”
    • Between “jíbara” and “americana”
    • Between the “eyes”/“I”s of a writer
    • Notes
  • Chapter 2. Nicholasa Mohr and Negation/Negotiation of the Mother-Daughter Relationship
    • Notes
  • Chapter 3. The fluid identity of Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales in Getting Home Alive
    • Containers that congeal the soul
    • Fluids that break the dam
    • Rivers that connect our stories / Threads that mend the tears of our souls
    • Notes
  • Chapter 4. “Y si la patria es una mujer”: The Political Discourse of Sandra María Esteves
    • Raising her “machete” against oppression
    • Stepping into rebellious movements
    • Inventing a new paradise
    • Notes
  • Chapter 5. “I Just Met a Girl Named María”: Luz María Umpierre-Herrera and the Subversion of Sexual/Cultural Stereotypes
    • Alice in Wonderland No More
    • I just met a girl and her name is NOT María
    • On the transcendence of being Luz Mar/garita
    • Notes
  • Chapter 6. Kissing the Mango Tree: Judith Ortiz Cofer and the Ritual of Storytelling
    • Notes
  • Selected Bibliography
    • Primary Sources
    • Secondary Sources

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