Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

film foray: COMO AGUA PARA CHOCOLATE 289
Tenenbaum indicates that her article will focus on how the fi lm manages
to please audiences on both sides of the border, but she writes at length
explaining to the “uninitiated”—her mother and “many among the subtitle
readers”—the cultural cues that she assumes they have not understood.
In this role of illuminator of the “true” Mexico, Tenenbaum exposes
her essentialistic approach: the fi lm must be tested for legitimacy against
what she believes to be Mexico’s cultural essences. She fi nds a few inaccuracies
but uses what she presumes to be the intentions of the fi lmmakers
to justify them. Cultural references, for example, are drawn from central
Mexico but the geographic setting for the fi lm is the U.S. border. Tennebaum
explains that this dislocation of culture and space allows the fi lmmakers
to draw upon the more tradition-oriented culture of central Mexico to
advance their argument about the power of tradition in shaping social
relations.
Repeating her mother’s questioning of the fi lm, Tenenbaum asks why
Tita ultimately refuses to marry Dr. Brown. Projecting her own mother’s befuddlement
on all citizens north of the border, Tenenbaum concludes that
U.S. audiences cannot understand the passion inherent in Mexicans. “In
the United States,” she says, “there are many kinds of love, and a marriage
based solely on passion is seen as quite a risky enterprise. In Mexico, however,
love is defi ned by passion.” She has proceeded from and arrived at what
semiotics fi nds to be an essentialist assumption: People from the United
States are intrinsically practical while people from Mexico are intrinsically
passionate. 1 An essentialist disagreement with Tenenbaum might set out to
prove that Mexicans are intrinsically uncalculating, not intrinsically passionate,
thereby swapping one ontological essentialism for another.
We can see that Tenenbaum herself is a bit uncomfortable with this argument
about intrinsic characteristics because she attempts to prove her
assertion with a seemingly scientifi c, or at least statistical, argument. She
reasserts an essentialist structure by insisting that both the cause and effect
of Mexicans seeking out their identity in an indigenous past can be traced to
the disproportionately lower numbers of European immigrants that Mexico
received when compared with other Latin American countries like Uruguay
and Argentina. Passionate love, therefore, is “truly” Mexican since
every Mexican has a preponderance of indigenous, not European, heritage.
Tenenbaum never defi nes this heritage as racial bloodlines, and she might
well be thinking of it in solely cultural terms, but her failure to distinguish
and clarify the issue leaves a lingering feeling of essentialism that Wade’s
discussion of ethnicity in Chapter 6 helps to detect.
Harmony Wu, on the other hand, is not at all concerned with judging
Como agua by whether it represents the true Mexico. She shifts attention