The movie "Like water for Chocolate"

The movie “Like Water for Chocolate” (1992), directed by Alfonso Arau is a love story between Tita and Pedro and why they couldn’t get married in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. The movie was based on a popular Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel. In my opinion, the movie doesn’t show us a lot of the history. The books “Modern Latin America” and “Open veins of Latin America” have more information about the history if we compare with the movie.

The movie doesn’t show much about the Mexican Revolution. We can see that Revolution more with dialogues between actors and stereotypes. As an example, Tita’s sister, Gertrudis, left the rancho and became a Zapatista. Other important example was the United States influence, showed by the doctor’s aunt who lives in Texas and speaks English and Spanish, representing the United States expansion as a national unit. The symbolism in the movie is very powerful and we can relate the food with emotions all the time, like when Tita’s sister married Pedro, she transferred her emotion to the food and all guests felt sad after they ate the cake. Also, when Tita made a dish and transferred her passion for Pedro on the food, and they ate that food they felt passion intensely.

The book “Open veins of Latin America” gave us more information about the Mexican Revolution which started in 1910, led by Francisco I. Madero against autocrat Porfírio Díaz. We also learned about Emiliano Zapata, who was a purest revolutionary and loyal to the cause of the poor. That movement had very important characteristics like socialism, anarchism, populism and agriculture movement and as a consequence; Mexico produced the Mexican Constitution of 1917 and created a Socialist Party.

Just a century after the Artigas land code, Emiliano Zapata introduced far-reaching agrarian reform in his zone of revolutionary jurisdiction in southern Mexico. It was five years after the dictator Porfírio Díaz had celebrated with huge fiestas the centenary of the Grito de Dolores, the beginning of the Mexican was of independence from Spain.(…) In 1845 the United States had annexed the Mexican territories of Texas and California, where it restored slavery in the name of civilization.(page 120/121).

That quotation represents the agriculture movement led by Emiliano Zapata, where “campesinos” fought to keep their land and didn’t let the government to take it but also the United States expansion as a national unit.

I remember that I saw the movie “Like water for chocolate” when I was very young, maybe 10 or 12 years-old and that time I didn’t know about the Mexican Revolution and to me the movie was only a romantic story with a lot of symbolism. One thing I remember from that time was the bedspread woven by Tita which to me represented the life course and time.

Works cited

Galeano, Eduardo, Open veins of Latin America: five centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. (Paperback). Monthly Review press; 25 Anv. Editon (January 1, 1997).