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Post talks about the Film Life Water for Chocolate, as well as references "Green Corn & Sacred Fire."
I can certainly see some similarities between the film Like Water for Chocolate and the lecture “Green Corn & Sacred Fire.” The most prominent being the importance of food within a culture. This token of culture seems to be emphasized as the lifeblood of not only the people but the entire culture. It serves to gather others around the common and biological desire that spans across timelines and heritages because the act itself is timeless.
In the lecture, we learned about the oral tale of Corn Mother and her two children – where everywhere she stepped, corn would sprout from the ground and feed the community. Everyday, they ate corn for supper until the sons murdered Corn Mother and dragged her through the crop fields, her blood trailing behind and causing more corn to grow. This is symbolic and a direct representation of food within Navajo culture – a literal interpretation of corn being part of their blood. Additionally, Corn Mother brought unity to the people living around her through the act of giving away food that came from her body. This ties into the roots of Navajo stories by implying that even though Corn Mother died in the story, she is living on as long as there are food and people to eat it.
The utilization of food is present everywhere in the movie Like Water for Chocolate. The first scene we see is Tita cutting up onions as she cries and shortly after we see her being born on a kitchen table. Later, she learns to use her emotions within her cooking – which is why she cries over the wedding cake – and it causes the people that eat her food to feel similar sadness as her. Even though the events around the film revolve around a lot of family and romantic drama, it truly feels like one is inside a kitchen while the food is being made to share with a community of people. Deep down, there is that link that everyone has that resides not just in their blood but in the food that they’re eating from Tita.
Furthermore, I’d like to conclude with an interesting correlation I saw between the two. In the oral tales we heard in “Green Corn & Sacred Fire” their purpose was to remember the importance aspects of each story and carry them down to the next generation to be heard as well. Similarly, in Like Water for Chocolate, the story of Tita isn’t narrated by the main character. Rather, she is the daughter of Esperanza who inherited her story through her cookbook. While the demographics of the film and the oral tales from Navajo culture are different, I like the idea that the two are similar with regards to why their story is being told the way it is – both orally, for example – as a way to show us as viewers of this material the importance of passing down stories and perhaps to a lesser extent to not repeat history.
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