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

film foray: COMO AGUA PARA CHOCOLATE 291
critic of the New York Times, suggests a reason for its popularity: “It relies so
enchantingly upon fate, magic, and a taste for the supernatural that it suggests
Gabriel García Márquez in a cookbook-writing mode.” Such praise
and success at the U.S. box office does not necessarily mean, however, that
audiences in the United States fully understood the action presented. In
fact, many among the subtitle readers proclaimed themselves perplexed.
Like my mother, they asked, “Why didn’t the girl marry that nice doctor?”
Aside from my Jewish mother’s fascination with doctors as the sine qua non
of husband material, the general question underscores not only the important
ways in which Mexico developed differently from many other nations
in the Western Hemisphere but also how Laura Esquivel was able to adjust
the screenplay of her novel of the same title to fi t a crossover audience in
the United States without alienating its Mexican public [. . .].
There are countless examples of spiritual restlessness throughout the
movie, and, even when offered a “calm, secure, and peaceful” life through
marriage to the American doctor who adores her, Tita, our heroine, eschews
probable happiness or at least contentment in favor of maintaining her forbidden
passion for the Pedro she fell in love with as a child. This decision
generally confused viewers in the United States, yet it nevertheless embodies
a traditional Mexican worldview and refl ects Mexico’s distinctive lack
of massive European immigration.
In the period during which most of the movie takes place, 1880–1914, immigrants
from Europe fl ooded many countries of the Western Hemisphere.
Indeed, it was during that time that my mother’s parents left Russia and Poland
to settle in Philadelphia. While we think of the United States, Canada,
Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina as immigrant societies, we have not thought
about what it meant to their counterparts—Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, and,
to a lesser degree, Peru—not to have undergone that immigrant experience.
Of course, we well know that Mexico is not simply an indigenous society;
it was conquered and colonized and mestizoized by those living in
the area currently known as Spain, who came there in hopes of winning for
themselves a better life. However, unlike nineteenth-century immigrants,
these Spaniards came to the New World as representatives of their government
and could count on its support, in most cases. They did what they did
in the name of the crown or the church, which in this particular case was
the same thing. They imposed, or tried to impose, their culture and way of
life on the indigenous empires and tribes they found in the land that they
conquered. And, over time, they blended more or less openly, and not so
openly, with that population, creating something that Mexican author and
statesman José Vasconcelos called “the cosmic race.” [. . .]