ABSTRACT
In 1992, the publication in English of the Mexican novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) by Laura Esquivel vaulted the culinary metaphor in a Latin American context into the view of an English-speaking readership. The release one year later of the lm based on Esquivel’s novel cemented the popularity of a work described by one critic as “a tall-tale, fairy-tale, soap-opera romance, Mexican cookbook and home-remedy handbook all rolled into one”.1 Within Esquivel’s narrative, the kitchen is characterized as a magical space from which the oppressed female protagonist, through the act of cooking, profoundly alters the surrounding world. Like Water for Chocolate captivated the public through generous doses of the magical realism most commonly equated by non-specialists with Latin American literary production. Simultaneously, by narrating the events of the story within the framework of a cookbook, Esquivel’s work helped to usher in a wave of literary criticism related to cooking and other domestic practices previously considered unworthy of academic treatment. The concept of the act of cooking as a creative strategy of resistance has, however, enjoyed a longstanding presence in Latin American literature since the seventeenth century.2 In the context of the Southern Cone3 in the twentieth century, Argentine and Chilean theatre practitioners have drawn on the space of the kitchen and the related acts of cooking, feeding, and eating as useful metaphors for responding to the region’s military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. As one might expect, in commenting on the systematic violation of human rights under the dictatorships, some playwrights have tapped into the violence inherent in cooking and eating.4 Others, by representing the act of feeding one’s family as a means of nourishing state-sponsored repression, have indicted those citizens who turned a blind eye to the violence around them.5 Amid these responses, however, there are those playwrights who, like Esquivel, see the agency suggested in culinary practices. Puesta en claro (Making Things Clear) by Griselda Gambaro6 (Argentina, 1974) and Lo crudo, lo cocido y lo podrido (The Raw, the Cooked, and the Rotten) by Marco Antonio de la Parra7 (Chile, 1978) portray the acts of cooking and serving food as maneuvers for destabilizing or inverting power relations. In each play, those who are exploited by the dominant power system defy this structure from its very center, participating in the system they
ultimately challenge. Their apparent complicity with those in power and the fact that they veil their acts of resistance with seemingly subservient tasks such as preparing and serving food allow them to pass undetected by those they oppose. In this way, the principal protagonists of both plays creatively transform the conditions of their oppression. At the end of each work, the protagonists’ departure from the enclosed space-home or restaurantrepresenting the authoritarian state metaphorically signals their rejection of the dictatorship’s nationalist project.
