Like Water for Chocolate

Magical realism refers to literature that blends magic and everyday life, exploring the liminal edges of reality while staying grounded in the real world. Magic represents more of a worldview than a fantastical element in itself, and though the reader may view magic as metaphor, the author and characters treat it as part of everyday life. The characters never explain the magical events that occur. Authors often use magical realism to examine complex subjects such as political conflict or strife. By rooting magic in real issues, the element can highlight the struggle of a particular marginalized group. The genre merges reality with the unique way one experiences life in their culture—often that with a history of oppression. Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate uses magical realism to tell the story of Tita De la Garza, a young girl living in Northern Mexico during the Mexican Revolution of the early 1900s. Through Tita’s magical cooking and her encounters with ghosts, Esquivel explores the realistic struggles of a teenager at odds with the rules of her mother. The author uses the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution to symbolize Tita’s own rebellion. Wedding guests are overcome with lust after eating cake, chickens take flight in a swirling tornado, and Tita weaves a bedspread the size of a ranch—all events which come off as mundane to the characters but captivate the reader, while still grounding them in a realistic setting.

Though the magical realist movement began in Europe, it has deep roots in Latin American literary tradition. German literary critic Franz Roh first coined the term in the early 20th century and used it to describe the visual arts. Magical realism was first used to describe a work of literature—Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis—in 1915. Franz Roh’s own work was translated into Spanish in 1927, coinciding with many Latin American writers spending time in Berlin during the early 1920s and 1930s; the term magical realism was used to describe writing from Buenos Aires in 1928. Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar Pietri published a collection of magical realist short stories in 1928, being the first writer to adopt the term realismo mágico. By the 1940s, poets like Miguel Angel Asturias and Alejo Carpentier widely used the term, solidifying magical realism as a literary movement. Latin American writers and poets took Roh’s ideas, combined them with elements of French surrealism, and wove them together with the indigenous mythologies of the Americas (“What is Magical Realism? Definition and Examples of Magical Realism in Literature, plus 7 Magical Realism Novels You Should Read-2022.” Master Class,).

During the 1950s, Latin American writers began to gain wider recognition for their magical realist work. The movement became popular on a global scale from 1962-1967, a time referred to as the “Boom Period.” The height of this period is marked by the publication of the Nobel Prize-winning novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriella García Márquez. Politics play a significant role in magical realism, and by the 1970s, authors began to incorporate real elements of political turbulence—including the United States’ intervention in the “Dirty Wars” in Latin America from 1976-1983.

In the contemporary era, authors like Laura Esquivel maintain popularity with a variety of readers from many cultural contexts. Magical realism has expanded to include the experiences of those from African and Asian diasporas, marginalized groups such as Indigenous American peoples, the LGBTQIA community, and neurodivergent individuals. Most see the expansion of the genre as an opportunity for readers to be exposed to postcolonial idealism as well as the cultures and mythologies of non-Eurocentric ideologies. However, some critics see magical realism as a genre belonging to Latin American literary tradition alone, making its use in other contexts cultural appropriation. No matter which side one lands on the debate, the literary world owes a debt of gratitude to Latin American authors for popularizing the genre with richly emotive environments and experiences.