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Americas

Mexico

Mexico is shaped by Indigenous civilisations, Spanish colonial rule, independence, revolution and an enormous diversity of regional identities. Food, family, religion, migration and political history often coexist in its art without clear boundaries between public history and private life. Mexican storytelling is also particularly comfortable allowing the extraordinary to exist beside the ordinary, sometimes because reality itself has already been complicated enough.

MexicoLike Water for ChocolateLaura Esquivel

Like Water for Chocolate

Como agua para chocolate

Laura Esquivel

First published: 1989
Genre: Novel / Magical realism
Language: Spanish
Length: 256 pages

About the book

Tita grows up in a family governed by a tradition requiring the youngest daughter to remain unmarried and care for her mother. Unable to marry the man she loves, she pours her emotions into cooking, only to discover that the food she prepares can transmit those feelings to everyone who eats it. Family expectations, desire, recipes and the upheaval of revolutionary Mexico gradually become impossible to separate.

Why this book

I thought you'd enjoy this because food becomes almost another language. Tita cannot always choose what happens to her, but she discovers ways of putting herself into the things she creates. Underneath the magic is a much more ordinary question: how much of your life should be determined by traditions that existed long before anyone ever asked what you wanted?

Cultural context

The novel unfolds against the period of the Mexican Revolution and places women's domestic lives beside national political upheaval. Food, family structures and inherited traditions become ways of understanding power just as much as governments and armies do. Its magical elements belong to a wider Latin American literary tradition in which extraordinary events can coexist naturally with historical and social realities.

Read the book

Find a digital edition

Official Penguin Random House English-language record, ISBN 9780385420174, listing paperback and ebook formats.

Why these two together?

Like Water for Chocolate uses magical realism, food and family tradition to make private emotion enormous. Roma does almost the opposite: it observes ordinary life so carefully that things normally treated as background become impossible to ignore. Together they offer two very different ways of looking at Mexican family life, gender, class and social expectation.

Before you go

01Remember that Mexico is culturally and geographically enormous; Mexico City is one doorway, not the entire country.
02Notice how much cultural memory is preserved through food and family rituals.
03Learn some basic context around the Mexican Revolution and twentieth-century political history.
04Look beyond the tourist-facing parts of a place toward the everyday labour that keeps it functioning.