Alec Dempster
Spanish 231
Asuncion Arnedo
Apr. 16 2022
magical food and magical realism
How chocolate water can be explored through the eyes, ears and nose of Tita de la Garza and her mother, Mama Elena. Tita strongly desires love and freedom, while Mama Elena acts as the obstacle that prevents her from reaching her goals. “Unquestionably,” Esquivel writes, “when it came to dividing, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, detaching, dispossessing, destroying, or dominating, Mama Elena was a pro” (Esquivel, p. 97). Because Mama Elena refuses to bond with tita, she develops a relationship with food that allows her to enhance her emotions.
Not only does her cooking allow her to voice her emotions, but the food Tita cooks reflects what happens later along in the story. For example, Gertrudis leaving the farm is a direct correlation to Tita’s cooking. While cooking, Tita’s sexual attraction to peter takes control of his food. This passion that tita cooks his food transmits to gertrudis, who leaves so that he can pursue his sexual attraction to Juan. John Brown illustrates the magic behind Tita’s food, saying that “it creates a brightness that shines far beyond our normal vision and then a splendid tunnel appears that shows us the way that we forgot when we were born and calls us to recover our lost divine origin’” (Esquivel, p. 243-244).
Images of fire and flame drive the novel’s intense passion and emotion. However, this image of fire also encapsulates the inner fire Tita struggles with throughout the novel. Perhaps the title of the novel best outlines Tita. Esquivel writes that, “Tita was literally ‘like water for chocolate’—she was on the verge of boiling over” (Esquivel, p. 151).
Vocabulary:
añorar to long for/miss
la lágrima tear
nodriza nurse
el grano de cafe coffee
el cacao cocoa
Esquivel, Laura. Like water for chocolate. New York, A Division of Random House Inc. 1989.