Como Agua Para Chocolate Research Articles

Elizabeth Acevedo, Laura Esquivel, and the Politics of Multilingualism

AbstractA number of bloggers, journalists, teachers, and librarians have compared Elizabeth Acevedo’s 2019 young adult novel With the Fire on High with Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (1989), recommending that fans of Esquivel’s work pick up Acevedo’s—and vice versa. These suggestions echo Acevedo’s own comments about the narrative, which she has characterized as “parecido a ‘Como agua para chocolate,’ pero en el barrio” (Acevedo & Pichardo, 2019). This article takes this recent reception history as an invitation to think through how With the Fire on High deepens and course-corrects the revolutionary path of Esquivel’s earlier text. More specifically, I interrogate how Acevedo and Esquivel engage with linguistic identities and with multilingualism in particular as source material for political resistance and healing. Acevedo, like Esquivel before her, represents multilingual identities in ways that disrupt and resist the neocolonial violence of the United States. However, whereas Como agua para chocolate’s references to minoritized languages are executed in a manner that threatens to reinscribe traumatizing ethnoracial and class hierarchies passed down via colonial history, multilingualism in Acevedo’s novel works more systemically to intervene in and undermine such established matrices of power. Acevedo participates in a project of linguistic resistance and healing that involves reclaiming a heritage language for a multiply marginalized protagonist and, through that act of reclamation, rejecting the received cultural wisdom propagated by both colonial and neocolonial systems.

Writing our stories with hooks and needles: literary women's voices in textiles

ABSTRACT From medieval romances to twenty-first century popular novels, weaving, sewing, embroidery, and knitting have been a framework for female voices otherwise marginalized by the culture depicted in the text or by the genre itself. The habitus connecting women and textiles is strong enough that, even as textile production has become almost wholly industrialized, the association remains powerful in contemporary popular culture. This article offers a comparative look at the textiles produced by women in Laura Esquivel's novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, Mexico, 1989) and Völsungasaga (The Saga of the Volsungs, Iceland, late 13th century). Although separated by almost a millennium, in these literary texts, Tita and Brunhild each use their skill at textile production to express the things they cannot say out loud. The close readings performed here are part of a larger work examining the varied means by which women in patriarchal societies enact agency through their reproductive labour, particularly women's communication of narrative through production of both texts and textiles.

Entre el diario y el recetario: la reivindicación de la escritura íntima en la trilogía culinaria de Laura Esquivel

¿Qué sucede cuando una novela se disfraza de diario íntimo y de recetario, dos géneros al parecer disímiles? El trabajo presente pretende desentrañar esta pregunta mediante un análisis de la trilogía culinaria de la escritora mexicana Laura Esquivel: Como agua para chocolate (1989), El diario de Tita (2016) y Mi negro pasado (2017). Algunas definiciones del diario íntimo y de la intimidad como fenómeno histórico arrojan luz sobre las funciones de la escritura íntima que El diario de Tita imita. Contrasto el espacio íntimo del diario con el espacio privado de la cocina en las primeras dos novelas. Aunque ambos espacios pueden resultar transgresores a su manera, el diario le confiere a su escritor la libertad especial de reflexionar y de autodefinirse. Para profundizar en el contraste entre el diario y el recetario, recurro a uno de los prototipos latinoamericanos del recetario que intercala el relato: Cocina ecléctica (1890) de la escritora argentina Juana Manuela Gorriti. En última instancia, analizo la ausencia de la escritura íntima en Mi negro pasado para respaldar el argumento de que la trilogía defiende el derecho a la intimidad y reivindica la escritura íntima dentro del espacio privado de la familia y del espacio público de la sociedad.

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

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.

Entrevista com Olga Savary

Pioneira da poesia erótica no Brasil, a poeta (como prefere ser chamada), escritora, jornalista e tradutora Olga Savary há mais de quatro décadas vem trabalhando em traduções de grandes obras literárias, ademais de contar com inúmeros prêmios e reconhecimentos por sua obra própria. É a maior tradutora de Pablo Neruda no Brasil, além de ter traduzido importantes autores da literatura hispano-americana, como Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa e Laura Esquivel. Em 1980 recebeu da Academia Brasileira de Letras o Prêmio Odorico Mendes de Tradução, por Conversa na Catedral, e em 1994 o Prêmio Jabuti de Tradução, por Como água para chocolate. Também traduziu indiretamente a três grandes mestres nipônicos do haicai: Bashô, Buson e Issa.Em entrevista exclusiva, a autora, do alto dos seus 84 anos, nos conta, em seu apartamento do Rio de Janeiro, sobre sua trajetória como tradutora com histórias irônicas e espirituosas.

Adaptación cinematográfica de Como agua para chocolate

Como agua para chocolate is the most important novel of Laura Esquivel, which was published in 1989. This story obtained an overwhelming exit. For that reason Alfonso Arau decided to make a brilliant film adaptation in 1992. In this article we will analyse the most important methods that were used to produce the film. We will also highlight the different awards that the film has obtained nationally and internationally.

Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History, and Nation-Making in the Americas

Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History, and Nation-Making in the Americas

Love and Romance in Revolutionary Mexico: Transnational Cinema Comes of Age

:Until the late 1980s, love in revolutionary epics followed distinctly national imperatives, comparative similarities existing at a superficial level. Not until Luis Puenzo's Old Gringo (1989) and Alfonso Arau's Como Agua Para Chocolate (1992) would films of the Revolution offer truly transnational stories, ones involving love in time of war.

Saberes y sabores en México y el Caribe (review)

Reviewed by: Saberes y sabores en México y el Caribe Joy Landeira De Maeseneer, Rita, and Patrick Collard, eds. Saberes y sabores en México y el Caribe. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Pp. 356. ISBN 978-90-420-3044-2. Rita De Maeseneer adopts a new term, “gastrocrítica,” to study the multiple connotations of food in cultural contexts and literary texts. Although food is the essential ingredient, it is the large measure of imagination and in-depth research of the fourteen essayists that makes this collection about the “saberes y sabores” of Mexico and the Caribbean so satisfying. Divided into two well-organized sections, each with seven essays and concise abstracts, the volume functions like two books in one, presenting food in both Mexican and Caribbean historical, social, literary, and cultural settings. As if to stave off anticipated accusations that food is an unworthy topic, De Maesenner’s introduction pointedly rejects what she and Jennifer Ruark have termed “scholarship-lite” literature that incorporates recipes to promote a feminist agenda, citing Como agua para chocolate by Laura Esquivel as an example, and eschews the easy use of “gastronomic imagery” in texts destined for mass consumption, stating: “[E]n esta edición hemos procurado no transitar por esta senda light” (10). The self-congratulatory implication that this volume’s gastrocritical approach is more sophisticated than previous “light” fare seems unwarranted. If “food” is at the core of gastrocriticism and a new subgenre is emerging, then all manner of approaches and primary texts should be considered and tolerated. Literary and cultural tastes vary, but a well-conceived critical method can and should yield equally respectable results. [End Page 348] Despite this initial “sour-grapes” attitude, the selection of essays from a 2007 colloquium at the University of Anwerp, Belgium, is indeed appetizing and reflects a mixture of social and literary contributions. Adolfo Castañón opens the section on Mexico by sampling the richness of its cuisine—mole, pozole, tamal, tortilla, and chile relleno—using historic, anthropologic, and literary resources. Industrial advances like milling corn, prefabricating mole, canning tamales, and mass-producing tortillas have fomented not only a kitchen revolution, but a sexual one. Critic An Van Hecke explores how the “woman-in-the-kitchen” image fuels imaginative works by Sandra Cisneros, linking food and magic with women’s power issues. The gastro-erotic relationship between food and sex, comida–cama, or more graphically put comer–coger, in the work of six Mexican writers is researched by Diana Castelleja. Again, the woman’s place and space is central to this dichotomy, since women are expected to satisfy all kinds of appetites and are often blamed for offering forbidden fruits. Even on the spiritual plate, food has an essential function, with Eucharistic bread and wine transubstantiating for Christ’s body and blood. Eugenia Houvenaghel explores Sor Juana Inés’s comparison of this sacred sacrament to an Aztec ritual, using a crónica by Torquemada, Teoqualo (Dios es comido), to unite material and spiritual matters. In his 1940 essay, entitled “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad,” anthropologist and folklorist Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) famously established the concept of “ajiaco” as the culinary emblem of Cuba in order to describe the island’s racial identities, inseparably connecting food to culture. Following in his footsteps, the saberes y sabores of the Caribbean section blends historic allusions to food with metaphors that define the diversity of this region. The first two essays deliver carefully detailed historical treatises of the cuisines of colonial America. José G. Guerrero’s fifty-two-page monographic essay enumerates specific foodstuffs and traditions that fused to form a cocina criolla that combines Indo-Afro-Hispanic tastes with French-Flemish-English-Portuguese cooking. De Maeseneer’s historical exploration of the culinary aspects of the Década del Nuevo Mundo, a sixteenth-century text by Pedro Martír de Anglería, even confronts the theme of cannibalism and succeeds in adding a controversial flavor to gastrocriticism. Although recipe books do not typically appear in scholarly studies, Efraín Barradas compares El cocinero puertorriqueño (1859) and El manual del cocinero cubano (1856) to illustrate how regional ingredients and preparation methods nurtured the formation of Puerto...

Significance of Tita’s Feminine and Transformative Power in Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate

We can analyse Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate as a novel which delivers a message of female emancipation impeded by the shackles of tradition. In this extract of my dissertation, I examine the plight of the protagonist, Tita, by considering the roles played by the kitchen domain and her mother and sister in her plight as a female struggling for liberation. In Como agua para chocolate, Tita’s outcry for a voice of her own from within the kitchen realm contends with the voice of the patriarchal society of the early 20th century Mexico as embodied by her mother, and it is this conflict which generates scope for feminist analysis of the novel. Therefore, I aim to demonstrate that Tita is instrumental in projecting the novel’s feminist message.

Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel (review)

Gonzalez, anibal. Love and Politics Contemporary Spanish American Novel. Austin: U of Texas P, 2010. ix + 177 pp.The Latin American literary Boom holds such sway over critics and readers alike that, its wake, many of both have been left scrambling to invent categories in which we try to trap amazing diversity of human textual endeavors (Gonzalez 144). Anibal Gonzalez sets out to provide a canonizing poetics for what he calls the new sentimental novel, a literary mode that has no history, his admirable study Love and Politics Contemporary Spanish American Novel. His success turns on one's definition of literature.A poetics is stamp of legitimacy and history that spells success for a literary tradition. A case point is Latin American literature as a whole. The commercial and critical successes of Boom put Latin American literature, whose legitimacy and authenticity had been question main, on world map. Gonzalez realizes that, although these total novels did not have an Aristotle or a de Rougemont behind them, they did have a Borges with New Yorker and a Balcells Barcelona. He realizes that for a literary mode to be accepted within canon, it must have imprimatur of establishment of critics, and this is precisely what he intends to do for some contemporary works and writers who, by his own suggestion, are usually on outskirts (2) and hold an ambiguous place canon (40).This is why main intertext Gonzalez's work is Denis de Rougemont's L'amour et l'Occident, originally published 1939 Love Western World is 1956 English translation). This classic study centers on medieval Romance of Tristan and Isolde, languishes on medieval Provencal courtly love, and ultimately provides a typology of amorous experience which has led to formulation of two opposing concepts of love Western tradition: eros and agape (13). Today's readers of Latin American literature might balk at first at seeing a preoccupation with such chronologically distant and seemingly far-afield literary criticism, especially light of prosaic short shrift (relegated to footnotes) Gonzalez usually gives here to more contemporary and apposite studies (feminist criticism, for example), and of contemporary body of theory and criticism that has shifted, if not broken altogether, polarized paradigm of eros-agape (queer theory, to name one approach). After all, one of Gonzalez's goals is to enfranchise, if not ensconce, this new modality he identifies within a modern literary history. However, what de Rougemont's study does for sentimental novel is what Dante's De vulgar i eloquentia did for European vernacular literatures: it provides credible antecedents and ancestors, even if model seems forced at times and does not always align well with more contemporary paradigms.Gonzalez introduces Miguel Barnet's Cancion de Rachel and Elena Poniatowska's Querido Diego as origins of new Spanish American sentimental narrative. Chapter one is devoted to Isabel Allende's rupture with testimonio De amor y de sombra. In chapter two, Gonzalez focuses on Alfredo Bryce Echenique as founding figure of new sentimental narrative. Chapter three looks at effects of both testimonial and sentimental narratives on celebrated Boom writers, such as Garcia Marquez. While chapter four studies how Laura Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate, Luis Sepulveda's Un viejo que leia novelas de amor, and Marcela Serrano's Nosotras que nos queremos tanto keep mass media and discourse of passion at arm's length, chapter five's focus on Antonio Skarm eta's Love-Fifteen and Luis Rafael Sanchez's La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos is more accepting of these discourses.Sentimentalism itself has often been derided by modern literary critics, but Gonzalez argues that it has a deeper motivation: the turn to love . …

Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

Mother-Daughter Relationship in Laura Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate

By confronting Terrible Mother in order to move beyond entanglements of mother/daughter relationship, and by claiming her as a metaphor for sources of our own creative powers, women are creating new self-configurations in which mother is no longer necessary comfort but seed of a new being, and in which we are no longer protected child but carriers of new woman whose birth is our own. Karen Elias-Button: 205 LAURA Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate --novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores y remedios caseros is a contemporary Mexican novel first published in 1989 that can be analyzed in various ways. The use of recipes and cooking as a means of expressing feelings and causing different reactions on people, use of recipes to begin each chapter, forbidden love, love triangle formed by Pedro, Tita, and Rosaura, roles of women in Mexican society, Mexican Revolution and other issues are certainly food for thought. However, I am particularly interested in relationship between Tita and her mother, Mama Elena, as I believe this sort of relation is crucial to a person's development and behavior. I intend to investigate relationship between Tita and Elena, applying theory of some critics concerning issue of motherhood-daughterhood. Tita is entrapped in a situation of not being allowed to marry man she loves and by whom she is loved because of tradition her family follows of not permitting youngest daughter to marry. As youngest, Tita was meant to look after her mother until she died. Laura Esquivel states that outer reality (in Tita's case, reality of being youngest daughter and having to fulfill her destiny) and inner desire (Tita's desire to marry Pedro) is something that interests her. Esquivel says: Tradition is an element that enters into play with destiny, because you are born into a particular family--Jewish or Islamic or Mexican--and your family determines to some extent what you are expected to become. And society is always there attempting to determine role we will play within And these expectations are not always in good relationship with our personal desires. I am always interested in that relationship between outer reality and inner desire, and I think it is important to pay attention to inner voice, because it is only way to discover your mission in life, and only way to develop strength to break with whatever familial or cultural norms are preventing you from fulfilling your destiny. Tita's destiny is sad, but she never quits fighting for a reversal of Esquivel, in same interview, states that [destiny] is a path you must follow, or travel, and it is up to you to decide how you are going to travel it. Sara Castro-Klaren points out that woman in Latin America is often portrayed as chaste when she is a Further, Castro-Klaren maintains that the idealization of female values, Catholic of Virgin Mother Mary (10) are explanations given by social analysts and historians for cult of mother. In Como agua para chocolate, however, Mama Elena is portrayed not as an idealized mother but as a tyrant. Her reaction on occasion that Tita first tries to express her opinion is an example of her character: Nunca, por generaciones, nadie en mi familia ha protestado ante esta costumbre y no va a ser una de mis hijas quien lo haga (9) [For generations, not a single person in my family has ever questioned this tradition, and no daughter of mine is going to be one to start (11)]. Furthermore, Mama Elena is later discovered to have betrayed her husband with her true love, her lover who was father of one of her daughters, middle daughter Gertrudis. Elena's bitter temperament is to some extent understood and forgiven by Tita when she finds out her mother's secret. Nevertheless, fact is that Mama Elena preaches something and behaves in a different manner. …

Remapping the Foreign Language Curriculum: An Approach through Multiple Literacies

Janet Swaffar and Katherine Arens offer a holistic approach to postsecondary language teaching that integrates the study of literature and culture into every level of the curriculum. By studying multiple genres ranging from popular to elite, students gain an understanding of multiple communicative frameworks - and develop multiple literacies. Swaffar and Arens propose the use of a sequence of template-generated exercises that leads students from basic grammar patterns to a sophisticated grasp of the interrelations among language use, meaning, and cultural context. One example of their approach is the teaching of Laura Esquivel's novel Como agua para chocolate ( Like Water for Chocolate ). From exercise to exercise, students consider use of tense, narrative strategy (the connection between recipes and plot), and the social codes in the novel compare the novel with the Hollywood film version (different imagery for different audiences) critique promotional descriptions of the film on the Internet examine a magazine interview of Esquivel (to expose the interviewer's assumptions) The authors combine theory and practice, research and personal experience, to present a new, interdisciplinary curriculum that should strengthen the teaching of foreign languages in junior colleges, four-year colleges, and universities.

At Boiling Point: Like Water for Chocolate and the Boundaries of Mexican Identity

Abstract — This article explores the mechanisms of Mexican identity as they are constructed in Alfonso Arau's film Como agua para chocolate (1991) (Like Water for Chocolate). In re‐designing the characters of Laura Esquivel's novel, Arau produces a range of filmic stereotypes drawn from both the Hollywood and the Mexican traditions of film‐making. Through the careful manipulation of filmic devices such as editing, framing and close‐ups, many of the features of Mexican otherness perpetuated by Hollywood throughout the twentieth century are inscribed. I apply the metaphor of boiling, derived from the film's title, to examine certain key concepts of cinematic ‘mexicanness’ including the tropes of ‘revolution’, ‘border’, ‘race’ and ‘sex’. Crucial to this argument is a consideration of the contemporary political climate in which Like Water for Chocolate was both produced and released. In Mexico, it was released halfway through the sexenio (six‐year period of rule) of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's rule and is clearly one of the most succesful cultural products (and exports) of his government's now infamous rule. In the United States, the climate of anti‐immigrant attitudes in 1992 and 1993 and the corresponding political tension provokes new readings of certain stereotypical images of Mexicans and mexicanness. It is the tension that is produced by the collision between these two contexts — cultural, political and ethnic — that forms the principal focus of discussion in this article.

At Boiling Point: Like Water for Chocolate and the Boundaries of Mexican Identity

This article explores the mechanisms of Mexican identity as they are constructed in Alfonso Arau’s film Como agua para chocolate (1991) (Like Water for Chocolate). In re-designing the characters of Laura Esquivel’s novel, Arau produces a range of filmic stereotypes drawn from both the Hollywood and the Mexican traditions of film-making. Through the careful manipulation of filmic devices such as editing, framing and close-ups, many of the features of Mexican otherness perpetuated by Hollywood throughout the twentieth century are inscribed. I apply the metaphor of boiling, derived from the film’s title, to examine certain key concepts of cinematic ‘mexicanness’ including the tropes of ‘revolution’, ‘border’, ‘race’ and ‘sex’. Crucial to this argument is a consideration of the contemporary political climate in which Like Water for Chocolate was both produced and released. In Mexico, it was released halfway through the sexenio (six-year period of rule) of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s rule and is clearly one of the most succesful cultural products (and exports) of his government’s now infamous rule. In the United States, the climate of anti-immigrant attitudes in 1992 and 1993 and the corresponding political tension provokes new readings of certain stereotypical images of Mexicans and mexicanness. It is the tension that is produced by the collision between these two contexts — cultural, political and ethnic — that forms the principal focus of discussion in this article.

The Erotic Dimension of Elena Garro's "La Culpa Es de Los Tlaxcaltecas"

The late Mexican writer Elena Garro's (1920-1998) exquisite and much anthologized magical realist short story La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas (1964), called a masterpiece of the genre, has by now generated a sizable corpus of critical essays, most of these coming out in the 1980s and 90s. The application to this work of poststructural, mythological, feminist cultural critical, and other models has yielded a wealth of analytical commentary serving to bring into relief much of the remarkable semiotic richness of what Sandra Messenger Cypess aptly characterizes as a a story where multiple possibilities are presented to preclude any one-dimensional reality (165). One of its aspects not so far singled out, though meriting passing commentary in a few instances, is that of the surprising sensuality that marks those passages dramatizing the axial reencounter between Laura, an upper middle class suburban wife in the modern Mexico of President Adolfo L?pez Mateos (1958-64), and a wounded Indian warrior whom Laura somehow recognizes instantly as her other husband (and also cousin), her primo marido from the sixteenth century. In the series of tryst-like meetings that follows in the course of the story, even though battle against the invading Spanish to save Tenochtitl?n literally rages around them during these times, it is the romantic and sexual draw between the two principals that becomes the motivating force in Laura's final, significant choice, recorded at the story's end. Previous to the publication of Laura Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate in 1989, few Mexican women writers seemed drawn to the foregrounding of eroticism in their works, as noted by David William Foster in his Alternate Voices in the Contemporary Latin American Narrative (1985). While from among Argentine literati Foster is rather surprisingly able to list the names of more women than men who write unabashedly about erotic themes, from among those of Mexico he succeeds in identifying only Mar?a Luisa Mendoza, for her novel De Ausencia, pub? lished ten full years after Tlaxcaltecas in 1974 (129-36). Yet, notably, Garro's story is included in at least one anthology devoted exclusively to erotic literature, that compiled by the Mexican

Latin American films, 1932-1994: a critical filmography

In 1931 Antonio Moreno completed Santa, Mexicos first true sound film. In it he established one of the foremost genres of Latin American cinema--the popular melodrama--which continues to this day. Latin American filmmakers came to the fore in the fifties and sixties and, as 1992s Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) showed, Latin American films continue to be a major part of the international film scene. In this work over 300 of the most significant films from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and other Latin American countries are covered. Each entry includes the English title, director, year of release, running time, language, country, and a detailed plot synopsis. Notes about the production and the filmmakers are also provided for many entries.

Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community

Reviewed by: Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community Eduardo González Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. 592 pp. A rather accurate though perhaps short-sighted view of magical realism sees it being born as a publishing event with Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967), achieving formulaic success in the ersatz storytellingness of Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (1982), and becoming the distinctive Latin American or Latino style of exportable sentimentality and sexy feminism in novels like Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (1989) and Oscar Hijuelos’s The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien (1993). Another far more encompassing perspective regards magical realism as an international mode of representation in which social realities are punctured, their routines altered, and their terrors and cruelties exposed in a spirit of excess that seems driven by the same dark energies of domination it wants destroyed. According to this wider and obviously more interesting view, the style operates in resistance to forms of rationality and domination linked to the disenchantment of the world, in Max Weber’s influential label. Thus, from Pynchon’s Vineland to Rushdie’s Shame, and, with English as direct or translated lingua franca, from Suskind to Kundera to Fuentes to Graham Swift and many others, late-modern magicians of the real may seem homelessly at home almost everywhere fiction might still be read for serious kicks. In adhering in their own random and imaginative ways to the second or global view of magical realism, the editors have organized their wide-ranging materials (consisting of 23 articles and essays) into four categories: “Foundations,” “Theory,” “History,” and “Community.” Under “Foundations” they include Franz Roh’s 1925 essay where the term was first used to [End Page 999] designate a turn to realism in painting in the wake of German Expressionism, and also an essay by Irene Guenther on art during the Weimar Republic and the aesthetics of “New Objectivity.” The German section is followed by a Latin American sequence of sorts, beginning with two of Alejo Carpentier’s key 1940s and 1960s novomundista essays, on the “Marvelous Real” and “Baroque” styles in the New World, and Angel Flores’s (1955) and Luis Leal’s (1967) academic pieces in which the attempt was made to situate and define “realismo mágico” as the predominant break-through fictional mode to come out of Latin America. The section ends with substantial essays by Amaryll Chanady and Scott Simpkins marked by theoretical and critical concerns attuned to current interests in postcolonial and postmodern polemics. In the next sections under “Theory” and “History” one finds little of either that is truly useful, but a great deal to agree and disagree with concerning readings of individual novels and poems by Günter Grass, Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, Derek Walcott and other elite international and U.S. writers. Here the anthology resembles Noah’s flood rather than his Ark, a messy quality that may disturb and frustrate disciplinary expectations of neatness and closure. Scheherazade becomes (in Wendy Faris’s breezy programmatic essay) a bit like the Muse of Comparative Literature, less a talking princess on death call than a mountain deity with a brood of prematurely postmodern children all capable of winning the Nobel Prize. The final section under “Community” seeks to establish a distinctive national, if not regional, climate for magical realism in the likes of William Kennedy, John Cheever, William Goyen, Kenzaburo Oe, Abe Kobo, and the Maghrebians Tahar Ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi. Any of the articles in this section might have been found under “History” or even “Theory,” as the boundaries separating each section remain porous and seem made to be breached. For just as Borges located a library in Babel, by the casual rules of this anthology, he might as well have opened a bookstore. Page-turning globe-trotters, arm-chair intertextualists, aging post-Gutenberg punksters, survivalists, as Borges himself was, in the art of reading rather than the craft of Literature, the authors gathered here matter far less than the writers they have domesticated and trained in their...

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

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