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

film foray: COMO AGUA PARA CHOCOLATE 293
as it is meant to do. The audience is not supposed to like Doña Elena; it is
meant to side with the victimized Tita.
When we next join the family, it is 1910, the year in which the Mexican
Revolution begins. We are preparing for Tita’s fi fteenth birthday, her
quinceañera, when she would officially become a woman and thus marriageable.
A neighbor’s son, Pedro Múzquiz, sees her and, true to Nacha’s
prediction, falls in love with her. She returns his feelings. As Tita says,
“Now I know how raw dough feels when it hits boiling oil; I expected to
break out all over my body.” The lovers acknowledge their passion verbally,
and Pedro promises to marry Tita. But when he with his father asks for
Tita’s hand, Elena forbids the match and offers her eldest daughter Rosaura
instead [. . .].
In a move shocking to both his father and to Tita’s household at large,
Pedro accepts, even though, as the servant Chencha notes, “You just can’t
substitute tacos for enchiladas” (that is, the plain for something fancier). At
this point the audience who understands Mexican history begins to shake
its collective head. As historian William French has noted for the neighboring
state of Chihuahua, it was common during that period for prospective
but forbidden grooms to “kidnap” their brides and marry without parental
consent. Tita herself screams this to Pedro later in the movie. In this case,
despite the probable approval of his father for such an action, in service to
a tragic plot, Pedro agrees to marry a woman he does not love in order to be
near the one he does. Yet there is precedent in central Mexico for this behavior.
For example, Celsa, the protagonist of Celsa’s World: Conversations
with a Mexican Peasant Woman, suggests that Elena’s laying down the law
is quite reasonable if not likable. 5 According to Celsa, a peasant woman who
lives in San Antonio, a village near Cuernavaca, whose comments were
gathered in 1979–1980, “People have respect for you if you can manage a
house or farm well and control your children. If the head of a family cannot
control the children, that person loses the respect of the people. [. . .] A
woman can do as good a job as a man if the children listen to her and do as
she says.” Elena, living alone and having three girls to raise, had to maintain
the respect of her neighbors in order to survive independently. The use
of this pattern of parental control common in central Mexico, rather than
the bride kidnapping found on the northern border, is only one suggestion
among many that Esquivel took a plot valid in the center and imposed it
on the northern frontier. That explains why she did not make more of the
typical aspects of the frontier, including its cuisine [. . .].
It is surprising that the revolution, the most important phenomenon in
twentieth-century Mexican history, plays such a small part in the action.