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

292 reframing latin america
That embrace of the indigenous past virtually closed the door to European
immigration at a time when the native inhabitants of the Western
Hemisphere were seen as threatening subhumans in both the United States
and the Southern Cone. Mexico did attempt to attract immigrants; it offered
land and other enticements but to little avail. Although European intellectuals
and some members of the elite perhaps were charmed by the idea of
noble savages across the sea, they were not about to leave home and settle
among them. As for the real potential immigrants like my grandparents,
imagine their reactions to the supposed temple of Montezuma and the fullsize
statue of Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor, that they would have
seen at the Mexican pavilion at the 1889 Paris Exposition! How could they
not have preferred the European buildings and progressive machinery found
at the exhibitions from the United States or Argentina close by? Suffice it
to say that Argentina did not even bother to exhibit in the 1900 Exposition;
it already had more immigrants than it could ever have thought possible.
To further complicate an already complex scenario, Like Water for Chocolate
presumably concerns itself with an area far away from the core of
Mexico, where yet a very different culture evolved on what would become
after 1848 the border between the Mexican world and Anglo-Saxon territory.
The movie quickly introduces us to the landscape of the border state
of Coahuila and the relationship between the towns of Piedras Negras and
Eagle Pass in the Rio Grande Valley in 1895. In addition, it alerts us to the
fact that the movie will be what used to be called a tearjerker, but a tearjerker
with a twist, for tears overtly play an important part in the plot. The
fi lm begins with the contemporary narrator’s putting an onion on her head
to prevent tears fl owing while she cuts onions. She introduces us to her tale
by relating the birth of her great-aunt and our heroine, Tita, who supposedly
cried so much in the womb that her dried birth water yielded a forty-pound
sack of salt (only ten pounds in the book). According to Celsa, a peasant
woman from whom we will hear more later, “Crying is a good way to purge
your soul of evil. It’s just as good a medicine as the herbal teas.” Welcome
to magical realism, Mexican style [. . .].
U.S. audiences watching this movie in 1993 were unable to empathize
with Doña Elena, even though they could well believe that she could have
demanded such daughterly devotion. What mother sitting in the audience
could imagine herself uttering such a pronouncement without fear of
prompting uncontrollable laughter from her offspring? Further, the beliefs
in individual will and romantic love are so fi rmly embedded in the mythology
of the United States that any cinematic parent who would try to control
a child’s destiny in such a way would evoke great resentment in viewers,