Laura Esquivel

Laura Beatriz Esquivel Valdés (born September 30, 1950) is a Mexican novelist, screenwriter and politician, serving in the LXIII Legislature of the Mexican Congress in the Chamber of Deputies for the Morena Party from 2015 to 2018. Her first novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) became a bestseller in Mexico and the United States, and was later developed into an award-winning film. Literary career In her novel Like Water for Chocolate released in 1989, Esquivel uses magical realism to combine the ordinary and the supernatural, with narrative devices similar to those used by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier as "el real maravilloso" and by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez and Chilean author Isabel Allende. Como agua para chocolate is set during the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth Century and features the importance of the kitchen and food in the life of its female protagonist, Tita. The novel is structured as a year of monthly issues of an old-style women's magazine containing recipes, home remedies, and love stories, and each chapter ("January," "February," "March," etc.) opens with the redaction of a traditional Mexican recipe followed by instructions for preparation. Each recipe recalls to the narrator a significant event in the protagonist's life. Esquivel has stated that she believes that the kitchen is the most important part of the house and characterizes it as a source of knowledge and understanding that brings pleasure. The title Como agua para chocolate is a phrase used in Mexico to refer to someone whose emotions are about to "boil," because water for chocolate must be just at the boil when the chocolate is added and beaten. The idea for the novel came to Esquivel "while she was cooking the recipes of her mother and grandmother." Reportedly, "Esquivel used an episode from her own family to write her book. She had a great-aunt named Tita who was forbidden to wed and spent her life caring for her mother. Soon after her mother died, so did Tita." According to Esquivel critic Elizabeth M. Willingham, despite the fact that the novel was poorly received critically in Mexico, Como agua para chocolate "created a single-author economic boom, unprecedented in Mexican literature or film of any period by any author" and "went into second and third printings in the first year of its release and reached the second place in sales in 1989" and "became Mexico’s 'bestseller' in 1990".