Slender and yet panoramic in scope, historical and yet relevant to current-day concerns, Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate has provoked from the outset a divergent range of critical opinions. ...The essays in A Recipe for Discourse: Perspectives on Like Water for Chocolate represent the novel's problematic nature in their many diverse approaches, perspectives that are certain to awaken in the reader new ways of approaching the text while challenging old ones. This volume's 'dialogue' format, in which essays are grouped thematically, is particularly effective in presenting such a diverse range of viewpoints. The reader will find herein lively discussion on LWFC as it relates to such themes as gastronomy, superstition, mythology, folklore, the Mexican Revolution, magical realism, female identity, alteration, and matriarchy/ patriarchy. It is the editor's hope that a diverse readership, from undergraduate students to seasoned scholars, will find this volume engaging and enlightening.
How and where can we locate the Malinche myth in a collage-like perception of cinema as articulated by Gilles Deleuze? Cinema weaves and re-weaves myths in/through movement image and time image so ...that both the subject and the viewer perceive and cohabit terrains of our personal and public experiences in a relationality of "becoming" nomad. Rosi Braidotti adds that the nomad subject is a splintered non-unitary subject, in a rhizomatic linkage with the post-human condition of the Anthropocene that may be non-linear and non-gendered in ways of embodied ontologies of the "normal." This paper argues that Maria Lugones' post-colonial proposal of reclaiming colored bodies as gendered and rational becomes another way towards becoming nomad. The film Como agua para chocolate is explored as an attempt to map the Malinche as a becoming myth located amidst an epistemological and an ontological struggle of post-human "seeing." Forbidden colors and bodies perform unique stories that denounce the hybrid, to consider instead a mosaic-like collage of differences moving towards affect and solidarities as a new ethics of nomadism. The collage is borderless like cinema itself where subjects and objects are in rhizomatic de/re-territorializations of movement image and time image. Keywords: Nomad, colored bodies, collage, time image, movement image
Weaving strands of Chicana and Mexicana subjectivities, Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas explores political and theoretical agendas, particularly those that undermine the patriarchy, across a ...diverse range of Latina authors. Within this range, calls for a coalition are clear, but questions surrounding the process of these revolutionary dialogues provide important lines of inquiry. Examining the works of authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Laura Esquivel, Carmen Boullosa, and Helena María Viramontes, Anna Sandoval considers resistance to traditional cultural symbols and contemporary efforts to counteract negative representations of womanhood in literature and society. Offering a new perspective on the oppositional nature of Latina writers, Sandoval emphasizes the ways in which national literatures have privileged male authors, whose viewpoint is generally distinct from that of women—a point of departure rarely acknowledged in postcolonial theory. Applying her observations to the disciplinary, historical, and spatial facets of literary production, Sandoval interrogates the boundaries of the Latina experience. Building on the dialogues begun with such works as Sonia Saldivar-Hull’s Feminism on the Border and Ellen McCracken’s New Latina Narrative, this is a concise yet ambitious comparative approach to the historical and cultural connections (as well as disparities) found in Chicana and Mexicana literature.
This essay explores the complexity of Laura Esquivel's conciliatory approach to the figure of Malinche in her novelMalinche(2006). I read the text in relation to textual and visual representations by ...Mexican and Chicana feminists. I also analyze the first three editions of the novel in the U.S. and in Mexico. As a result, I analyze symbolic betrayals that have to do with processes of cultural translation. In this context, I discuss the function of Esquivel as a writer in-between cultures who has the authority to design the plot and to be a traitor, but may also be betrayed in the process.
Este ensayo explora la compleja posición conciliadora de Esquivel con respecto a la figura de la Malinche en su novelaMalinche(2006). Un estudio del texto en relación a representaciones textuales y visuales de feministas mexicanas y chicanas, así como un análisis de las tres primeras ediciones de la novela en Estados Unidos y México, revelan distintos procesos de traición que tienen que ver con procesos de traducción cultural. En este contexto, discuto la función de Esquivel como escritora entre culturas con autoridad para construir la trama, traicionar y ser traicionada.
This research shows that the Mexican novel Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel belongs to the Magical Realism due to it contains several characteristics of this Latin American current such as ...syncretisms, myths, legends, and social problems like femenine repression. Furthermore, it is shown that Esquivel’s work is not light and does not imitate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work.In chapter 1 of this work, historical aspects within the novel are be analyzed such as slavery in the United States and the participation of women soldier, soldaderas, in the Mexican Revolution. In chapter 2, aspects of magical realism like sincretisms, myths, legends, and the uncanny as a result of syncretisms in the life of Tita de la Garza are analyzed. In chapter 3, the social problem of feminine repression and what different feminine characters in the novel represent.Finally, it is established that Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate belongs to Magical Realism, it is not a light literary work, and it is not a copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work.
In brief - Malinche Stech, Diana
The Financial times (London ed.),
07/2006
Newspaper Article
Malinalli, or Malinche as both she and Hernan Cortes came to be called, is sold into slavery and eventually becomes a translator for the Spanish. At first she hopes they have been sent by one of the ...gods to end the rule of the Aztec emperor Montezuma. Then, as she bears witness to the Spaniards' cruel ambition and their "sick" hunger for gold, those hopes turn to doubt.
Simon & Schuster's Atria Books is publishing Laura Esquivel's novel in both Spanish and English before Santillana -- the Spanish publisher who approached Esquivel with the idea of fictionalizing the ...life of one of Mexico's most controversial characters -- does so in Mexico and the rest of Latin America later this year. (The U.S. Spanish- language edition is out; the English, translated by Ernesto Mestre- Reed, will arrive in May). Esquivel also invented one of the book's most extraordinary characters -- Malinalli's grandmother, who guides her when her widowed mother abandons her to live with a younger man. The old woman represents "the wisdom of the indigenous culture and their powerful vision of the spiritual world," Esquivel says. Through the old woman's teachings, Esquivel brings to readers her own discoveries about mystical Mayan beliefs in which astronomy and biology become an integral part of religion and spirituality. To die, for example, is to "be outside of time." Stars are ancestors watching over their loved ones, and the sun, moon and water sources of spiritual energy and healing. (Esquivel dedicated the book simply, "To the Wind.")
Ibsen discusses Laura Esquivel's "Como agua para chocolate" (1989) novel and suggests that Esquivel has neither replicated the male canon nor popular "woman's" literature.
