Pedro reluctantly marries Rosaura, Titas oldest sister, but makes it clear that he has married Rosaura solely to be near Tita. Pedro and his new wife live on the family ranch which makes it possible for Pedro to constantly remain in contact with Tita. Unable to marry her love, Tita is distraught with grief and transfers all her energy into her culinary skills, which Rosaura lacks. She excels the art of cooking and uses the power of food, unconsciously, to draw Pedro towards herself and away from Rosaura. Tita cooks a meal with rose petals given to her by Pedro, which has an intense effect on Titas second sister, Gertrudis, who flees into a lustful state, into arms of a revolutionary soldier. Rosaura bears a son, Robert, who is delivered by Tita. She treats her nephew as her own child, even produces breast milk to feed him as her sister is dry.As Pedro is drawn in the spell created by Titas cooking, Mama Elena moves Rosauras family to San AntonioTexas.
Already unhappy Tita is totally devastated by the separation. Soon, the family gets the tragic news of Robertos death. Tita has a nervous breakdown as soon as she hears in the news. Mama Elena decides to institutionalize her. Dr. John Brown, an American doctor, brings Tita to his own house and treats her. He gently treats her broken spirit and her physical ailments. Tita decides that she will never return to her mother. Her decision does not last very long as she had to return to the ranch almost immediately as Mama Elena gets injured in a raid by rebel soldier. All her attempts to care for her mother are thwarted by Mama Elena. She even refuses Titas cooking as she feels that Tita is trying to poison her.
Eventually, Mama Elena dies from an overdose of strong emetic which she takes for fear of poisoning. With Mama Elenas death, Tita is free from the obligation of looking after her mother. Meanwhile, she accepts when Dr. John Brown proposes to marry her. Pedro and Rosaura return to the ranch with their daughter Esperanza. After seeing Pedro, Titas love for him rekindles. When John asks Pedro to bless the marriage, the same night Pedro makes passionate love to Tita and takes her virginity. After that night, Tita feels with certainty that she is pregnant. She thinks that she has to tell John of her affair with Pedro and end the engagement. Mama Elena returns to the ranch as a spirit and curses Tita and her unborn child. Titas sister Gertrudis returns to the ranch. She is now a general in the revolutionary army. Tita is very happy to see her sister back at the ranch. Mama Elenas spirit returns violently and asks Tita to leave the ranch. Instead of leaving the ranch, Tita finally decides to stand up to her mother and declares her autonomy. After such a forceful declaration, the ghost shrinks into a tiny light. As soon as the ghost is expelled, Tita feels relieved of the pregnancy symptoms. The fiery light of Mama Elena ghost falls on Pedro, setting him on fire instantly. Tita rescues him, cares for him and helps him in recovering. Even after Tita confesses of her relationship with Pedro, he still wants to marry her but leaves the final decision to her.
Many years pass. Rosaura dies and frees her daughter Esperanza from the same tradition as Tita which is forbidding them to marry. After Rosauras death Esperanza and Alex, Johns son, get married. With everything taken care of, Tita and Pedro are finally free to be with each other. On their first night, both of them make intense love and are carried into a tunnel to take them to the afterlife. The intensity of her love kills Pedro. Desperately wanting to be with Pedro, Tita eats all the candles in the room in an attempt to ignite her inner fire. She succeeds in reentering the tunnel where she meets Pedro in the world of spirits.
Their union this time sets the entire ranch on life. The only thing to remain intact was Titas recipe book. There is a heavy dose of magical realism throughout the story. She translates her feelings into her cooking. She prepares these meals to remain in contact with Pedro. On Pedros wedding with Rosaura, Tita prepares a cake that makes the guest vomit. In the end, Titas passion opens a portal to the world of spirits which kills Pedro. Tita remembers all her happy thoughts to reopen the portal and follow Pedros spirit. The energy thus created is so intense that the whole ranch is consumed within that fire. Tita is finally successful in escaping from her destiny and now she is free to be with Pedro forever.
Emotional Oppression
It is evident, especially in the first few chapters, that Tita has been emotionally oppressed by her dictator-like mother. Her mother, enforcing a family tradition, decrees that Tita is not allowed to marry because she is obligated to care for her mother until she dies. Deprived of the love of her life, Tita is forced to repress her feelings and transmute them into her cooking. The feeling she pours into her cooking then affects the people who eat it, contributing to the magical realism evident throughout the novel, as her repressed emotions have tangible, magical consequences.
Self Growth
At the beginning of the novel, Tita was a generally submissive young lady. As the novel progresses, Tita learns to disobey the injustice of her mother, and gradually becomes more and more adept at expressing her inner fire through various means. At first, cooking was her only outlet, but through self-discovery she learned to verbalize and actualize her feelings, and stand up to her despotic mother.
Tradition
The romantic love that is so exalted throughout the novel is forbidden by Tita's mother in order to blindly enforce the tradition that the youngest daughter be her mother's chaste guardian. However, the traditional etiquette enforced by Mama Elena is defied more and more throughout the novel. This parallels the setting of the Mexican Revolution growing in intensity.
Mexican screenwriter Laura Esquivel's first novel, Like Water For Chocolate, met with unusual success when it was published in 1989. The enthusiasm about the book led to a Spanish-language movie of the same title, which also was immensely popular. Upon translation from Spanish into English in 1992, the novel incited similar excitement, becoming a best-seller; subsequently, the English-subtitled film became one of the most popular foreign-language films in American film history. In addition to this popular success, Like Water For Chocolate received critical acclaim, as it emerged during the early 1990s, when new ideas about multiculturalism in literature brought attention to the work of previously ignored minority women authors.
Like Water For Chocolate belongs to the genre of magical realism. This literary style, first developed by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in his 1949 essay "Lo maravilloso real," generally describes novels by Latin American writers (though it is increasingly applied to writers of any background) that are infused with distinct fantastic, mythical, and epic themes. Magical realism is often explained as a unique product of the Latin American condition, particularly its history of European colonialism, which resulted in a delicate relationship between the contradictory yet co-existing forces of indigenous religion and myth and the powerful Catholic Church. In the case of Mexico, Esquivel's homeland, one need only look as far as two of the country's dearest cultural narratives for an example of this balance. The first is the Aztec myth describing the founding of Tenochitlan, which later became Mexico City. The myth tells the story of the Mexica, wandering hunters who received the vision that their empire would be built upon an island where an eagle sat on a cactus devouring a serpent. The fulfillment of this apparition is still held today as the historical beginning of the Aztec empire and modern-day Mexico. The second cultural narrative involves the Virgen de Guadalupe, who, according to legend, appeared to the indigenous man Juan Diego as a brown-skinned Madonna amidst a flurry of rose petals. Catholicism came to the conquered natives thus embodied, and the Virgen eventually became the patron saint of the country. Both stories rely on potent visual imagery that heightened natural elements and events by adding an element of the fantastic.
The characters in Like Water for Chocolate are set against the backdrop of the most important modernizing force in Mexican history, the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17. During this time, peasants and natives banded together under the leadership of figures such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata to reject the old order's dictatorship, revive democracy, and claim Mexico for the everyday man and woman. Esquivel uses the revolution to explore themes of masculinity and gender identity, and examine how individuals appropriate for themselves the revolution's goal of liberty.