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. Rivera reconstructs the ethno-feminist aesthetic of Judith Ortiz Cofer, Sandra Maria Esteves. Nicholasa Mohr, Aurora Levins Morales. Rosario Morales, Esmeralda Santiago, and Luz Maria Umpierre-Herrera. In separate chapters dedicated to each of the writers, the author locates their works within a framework of feminist thoery 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.