Cooking Mexicanness: Shaping National Identity in Alfonso Arau’s Como agua para chocolate

Abstract

In 1991, when Mexican film director Alfonso Arau decided to adapt the 1989 novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) as a film, he probably did not imagine it would become the most successful foreign film of the year. The novel had been written by his wife of that time, Laura Esquivel. Both book and film attracted a lot of critical attention-not always positive, but at least they were being talked about, prompting interest. That the film should be successful in Mexico was no surprise, since the book had also been extremely popular, but its international triumph was startling to many given the fact of its “Mexicanness.” Why would foreign audiences be interested in a film about a Mexican woman cooking Mexican meals? Obviously they were, as the film earned “almost $20 million at the U.S. box office, [thus becoming] the first Latin American film-indeed, any foreign film-to have this kind of popular reception in the Hollywood-immersed North American market.”1