Como agua para chocolate and ‘Intimas suculencias’: Laura Esquivel’s nueva literatura and the creation of a canon of women writing about food, knowledge and pleasure

Sarah Bowskill

doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.233

Abstract

Since it was published thirty years ago, Laura Esquivel’s first novel Como agua para chocolate has been the subject of intense critical debate. On the one hand, Como agua is associated with the ‘boom femenino’ of Spanish American women’s writing in the 1980s. On the other, it is dismissed as ‘light literature’. Esquivel’s subsequent work has received scant attention. This article calls for a reassessment of Como agua in light of Esquivel’s own overlooked theoretical interventions published in an essay entitled ‘Intimas suculencias. Tratado filosófico de cocina’. ‘Intimas’ calls for, and outlines the characteristics of, a nueva literatura which would foster new ways of understanding the relationships between food, knowledge and pleasure. This article uncovers the extent to which Como agua met the standards of nueva literatura set out by Esquivel. In ‘Intimas’, Esquivel also traces a tradition of Hispanic women who have written about food, knowledge and pleasure. The women in this canon include Inés Arredondo, Dorelia Barahona, Rosario Castellanos, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and María Luisa Mendoza. This article revisits the work of these forerunners as well as developing a new understanding of Como agua and highlighting Esquivel’s contribution to consolidating a canon of Hispanic women writers.

Highlights

This article seeks to show that our understanding of both Como agua and the essay ‘Intimas suculencias’ is enhanced if they are read as companion texts in an overarching project to conceptualise and put into practice a nueva literatura
As well as a uniting of food and knowledge and revaluing the kitchen as a non-gendered space, Esquivel imagined that there would no longer be a negative association between food and sexual pleasure and that there would be a celebration of female sexuality
Esquivel used her speech at a public event that is at the heart of the Mexican cultural calendar to cite the work of five Hispanic women authors

Summary

Introduction

Art. 3, page 3 of 23 identified by Esquivel as illustrative of important trends in the ways in which food, knowledge and pleasure have been represented in the Hispanic world and how these representations reflected the changing status of women. While Esquivel selected these texts, they and Como agua belong to an even broader tradition, identified by Tamer Heller and Patricia Moran, of women writing about food, knowledge, pleasure and the kitchen space as a way of expressing ‘deeply conflicted feelings about appetite and desire, authority and assertion’ (Heller and Moran 3).

Results

Conclusion