Laura Esquivel's "Como agua para chocolate": The Questioning of Literary and Social Limits

Abstract

Mexican writer Laura Esquivel's novel Como agua para chocolate published in 1989 is an example of magic realism that evokes the Mexican/U.S. border. A love story that highlights the kitchen recipes blending amores y remedios caseros and Rabelaisean humor, it also hints of the flavors of chiles en nogada, rosca de reyes and tortas de Navidad contributing to a savo? ring of the text. One way to read this novel is as its subtitle suggests, as a novela de entregas, putting it to on the back burner, a fuego lento. However, its success that earned Esquivel the title of Woman of the Year in Mexico in 1993 now warrants a different approach: moving it to the front of the stove to cook a fuego vivo. As of June 1993, Como aguapara chocolate had sold 200,000 copies in 16 printings in Mexico. Gaining international attention translations into 18 languages, it has appeared on the menu of New York Times best seller list and has been shown in its movie version in 34 countries; its release as a video will augment its distribution even further. Critics of Como agua para chocolate have variously pointed to it as one example too many of magic realism, pop lit unworthy of serious attention, or a novel of little interest to the male reading public. What these reactions seem to boil down to are descriptions of a work, like those of other Latin American writers such as Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, Rosario Ferr?, Isabel Allende, Elena Poniatowska and Luisa Valenzuela, that does not reproduce the established societal relations of power, but rather explores them in a parody of the national allegory of public politics, as it transposes the political onto the personal. This is a profoundly feminine if not feminist novel. As Francine Masiello indicates, like all minority discourse Latin America feminist practice sets out to defy prevailing social hierarchies in order to alter relations between the dominated and the ruling classes, between the marginalized and those at the centers of power so as to redefine the axis of social relations within the groups of the dominated (53). Como aguapara chocolate is primarily set during the Mexican Revolution beginning in 1910, a war that, as Jean Franco notes, was represented to the Mexican public as a major social transformation: women had followed armies, fought, fled from their homes, lost their men, survived, had nursed and fed troops (Plotting 102). Franco further indicates that during the Revolution an incipient feminist movement had taken shape. However, that war with its promise of social transformation, encouraged a Messianic spirit that transformed mere human beings into supermen and constituted a discourse that associated virility social transformation in a way that marginalized at the very moment when they were, supposedly, liberated, (Plotting 102) a phenomenon evident in Como agua para chocolate . That text is one in which the Mexican Revolution reverberates, overturning literary and social conventions of form, the