Laura Esquivel

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Romancing the Cook: Parodic Consumption of Popular Romance Myths in Como agua para chocolate

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SOURCE: “Romancing the Cook: Parodic Consumption of Popular Romance Myths in Como agua para chocolate,” in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 24, No. 48, July, 1996, pp. 56–66.

[In the following essay, Dobrian states that through the use of parody in Como agua para chocolate, Esquivel is not ridiculing romance novels, she is denouncing the male-domination in society that makes women want to read romance novels.]

Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate represents a parody of popular myths that, by encapsulating female characters within formulaic and prescriptive roles, strive to eliminate feminine diversity and individuality. Several critics have noted that Esquivel utilizes the double strategy of inscribing certain codes and then waging an assault on these very constructs. As Beatriz González Stephan summarizes, Esquivel situates her narrative “sobre los discursos autoritarios de la represión y el poder en todas sus dimensiones, y sobre una nueva perspectiva que transgrede el orden establecido” (211). Kristine Ibsen characterizes the transgression as a dissolution of “borders between canonized and popular literatures, between oral and written discourses, [in which] the hierarchy governing such distinctions are subverted as well” (143). Cecilia Lawless also notes the erosion of “established boundaries,” and locates the focus as an opening up of female determination, a defamiliarization of “a cultural territory to create ambiguity” of feminine terrain (263). Finally, given the parodic nature of the novel, with its “rule-breaking and border crossing,” Kathleen Glenn suggests that Como agua para chocolate “needs to be read not straight but slant” (46).

As a postmodern parody, Como agua para chocolate represents a pastiche of genres. It is all-in-one a novel of the Mexican Revolution, a cookbook, a fictional biography, a magical realist narrative, a romance novel, and serial fiction. Amidst this generic slippage, the underlying element that ties these genres together within this novel are the assertions of femininity found in popular culture. Although on the surface Esquivel structures her novel as a popular romance, the generic hybridization and parodic stance open and free the novel from the restricted and hermetic formulas that tightly structure the typical romance narrative. Linda Hutcheon emphasizes this effect of parody when she posits modern parody as a liberating strategy that, rather than criticizing the original text, may instead be directed towards the social codes that enable such a narrative. Indeed, Esquivel adds a political charge by situating her narrative against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution. In doing so, the author both forges an underlying theme of rebellion, change, and momentum in the gender politics of the novel, and confronts Mexican popular myths of femininity within the bloody conflict. By waging war, both literally and figuratively, between repression and liberation, a new story comes to light, or perhaps, better said, the same story is read in a new light. That is to say, history translated as tradition inscribed upon a public (con)text receives a different reading. (His)story becomes recontextualized from a female point of view (Ibsen 136), in which cooking and writing form parallel creative forces, each enhancing the other. As Kathleen Glenn observes, “Esquivel subverts tradition by ennobling a ‘domestic’ skill and turning it into an art form. In a similar manner she valorizes marginalized literary forms” (41).

In her book Reading the Romance, Janice Radway suggests that romance novels essentially portray the female quest for social identity (134). Generally, the genre presents the transformation of an insecure adolescent into a mature woman who fulfills her potential through the socially prescribed domains of marriage and motherhood. Initially, the heroine appears somewhat contradictory in these terms, often representing a mixture of feminine beauty and masculine temperament. She may be spunky and aggressive, even going so far as to masquerade as a man. However, Radway argues that part of the formulaic presentation rests on giving the heroine a voice and strength of will, only to later silence and objectify her (124). Tania Modleski describes as a “disappearing act” this apparently happy subversion of the heroine’s attempts at self-assertion (47). Only by assuming a feminine selflessness, by sacrificing her aggressive instincts, can she achieve happiness. In fact, Modleski suggests that the goal of mass-produced fantasies for women, including the romance, is to assert masculine superiority and to disable the female heroine by domesticating her into passivity (12). As Radwell terms it, by situating women in the domain of home and intimacy, the romance presents as the only happy resolution to the search for social identity the confinement of the heroine within the traditional division of labor, (123).

Nevertheless, Modleski explains the popularity of the romance novel, with its formulaic characters and conflicts, as the repeated attempt of women readers to cast a positive light upon their traditional circumscribed life of domesticity (111). By presenting the male hero’s often cruel and resistant nature as an ironic overflowing of his love for the heroine, the romance novel may serve to present the submission to patriarchal society as a process of self-discovery and self-awareness for the female, who in turn receives patriarchy’s promise of reciprocal love from the male.

In her parodic stance to the romance novel, Esquivel does not condemn the genre, but instead criticizes the social structures that engender the need for these narratives. Como agua para chocolate subverts cultural constructs that prescribe a single paradigm of the ideal female as domestic, submissive, self-sacrificing, and disempowered. Such elements are displayed and rooted in the text through the main character of Tita, whose destiny, to the exclusion of marriage and family, is to care for her mother until the latter’s death. Esquivel takes a parodic stance in two ways by subverting the popular myths that display this reductive tendency. First, the author inverts, exaggerates, or recodes myths of the popular romance, including that of the damsel in distress rescued by her knight, home as the single ideal female space, status of domestic excellence as solely female, the “redundantly masculine hero” (Radway 139), the continuous obstacles to true romantic union, and the happy ending, which resolves all romantic conflict through marriage and family. Further, by literally providing a culinary recipe at the beginning of each chapter and a promise for a new one in the next, Esquivel foregrounds the prescriptive element of socially determined femininity. As the recipes unfold within each chapter, Esquivel makes it clear that neither stuffed peppers nor femininity can be successfully created by merely combining a predetermined set of ingredients.

Esquivel begins her assault on romance formulas by inverting the typically very masculine characterization of the romance novel’s hero. Although young and handsome, Tita’s love interest, Pedro, is not the usual aggressive, domineering, decisive, swaggering hero, but rather embodies a passive and weak figure. When Tita’s mother refuses to allow the two to marry, rather than actively affronting the social laws of early twentieth century Mexico by eloping with Tita, the only solution that Pedro sees is to marry Tita’s sister, Rosaura, in order to remain near his beloved. In fact, Pedro’s North American rival, John, represents a more active yet sensitive character, who rescues Tita when she undergoes a nervous breakdown under her mother’s cruel authority, and then later, kindly steps aside when she chooses Pedro. Further, through the figure of Pedro, Esquivel subverts the typical male hero’s ardent, virile, and uncontainable sexuality. Ibsen suggests the demasculinization of Pedro as a parody of the “hyperbolic sexuality” (136) that appears frequently in boom and postboom Latin American novels. The most obvious example is José Arcadio of Cien años de soledad, whose size and stamina are so remarkable that the town prostitutes hold a raffle among themselves to see who will become the lucky recipient of his talents. Esquivel inverts the prominent virility of the romance hero and transfers the hyperbolic nature of sexuality to Tita through the magical effect of her cooking and to her sister, Gertrudis, who later in the novel becomes a prostitute, only to leave the brothel where she works after wearing out any number of men there. Although Pedro’s new wife, Tita’s sister, repeatedly suggests that they consummate their marriage, Pedro successfully struggles to remain chaste for several months, after which time, fresh out of excuses, he prays with true sincerity and sacrifice, informing God that this sexual act serves for procreation only. Rather than emphasizing the hero’s overwhelming sexual virility in relation to the heroine, Esquivel instead highlights Pedro’s attempts to avoid sexual contact with his wife.

However, in Pedro and Tita, Esquivel literalizes the figurative nature of burning passion that exists between the typical romance couple. Romance literature generally portrays the sex act between the male and female protagonists as ardent, explosive, and intensely satisfying to both parties. Unlike Pedro’s sterile, forced relations within the legal frame of marriage, Pedro and Tita cannot be restrained or contained by society’s proscriptions. When Tita and Pedro finally physically consummate their love, the sky lights up with unexplained fireworks, interpreted ironically by one character as the return of Tita’s dead mother. At the novel’s end, their love becomes so explosive and ardent that it sparks a blaze that consumes the entire ranch and quickly brings the narrative to a close.

Uncontainable sexuality, freely expressed only outside society’s legal framework, is also exposed elsewhere in the novel. In a scene vividly portrayed in the film based on the book, Gertrudis, after eating her sister’s aphrodisiacal meal, attempts to quench her sexual longing within the confines of her maternal home by taking a cold shower, a typically male gesture. Fortuitously, Juan, a revolutionary, magically drawn by her longing, gallops onto the ranch and carries her off. The scene sharply parodies the rescue formula which dictates that the dashing hero, wielding superior strength against all adversity, gallantly save the weak, passive, distressed, utterly feminine maiden from danger. Gertrudis humorously represents a damsel in erotic distress, running naked across the Mexican plain towards her knight who, instead of wearing shining armor, comes to her ragged, dirty, and war torn; he does arrive by horse, however. The scene effectively highlights and parodies the sexual context of the typical rescue paradigm, usually coded as physical danger from which the heroine is saved. Instead, the incident enacts Gertrudis’s rescue from society’s enforced sexual repression, and portrays her escape as wild intercourse on a galloping horse. In fact, Gertrudis is so successfully rescued from her repressed sexuality that eventually she physically wears out her rescuer and moves on to become a prostitute, as described above.

Although Esquivel parodies the dramatic rescue scenes that abound in romance fiction, she adds yet another layer to her parody by further emphasizing Pedro’s consistent inability to rise to the occasion. The dashing, heavily romance-saturated rescue scene of Juan pulling the nude Gertrudis up onto his horse and then galloping away contrasts vividly with Pedro’s subsequent actions. As he witnessed the incident, Pedro received a virtual step-by-step how-to manual for assertive, romantic action. After Gertrudis and Juan ride off, Tita, who has also been a spectator, turns to Pedro, beseeching him with a look to do the same. But at that moment Mamá Elena’s voice rings out, effectively wilting any romantic intention Pedro might have had. The reader cannot help but compare Juan’s dashing rescue, galloping off on horseback, with Pedro’s weak escape, furiously pedaling off on his rickety bicycle. This is certainly not the vehicle of choice for the romance hero.

Esquivel may place Tita in the kitchen, the stereotypical female domestic space, but the author redefines both Tita’s culinary skills and this female domain. As Lawless notes, food has traditionally been relegated to “a gendered discourse—the woman’s domain, hence marginalized—and therefore not a discourse of empowerment” (262). But as Lawless further observes, in Como agua para chocolate Esquivel’s “kitchen becomes a site for production of discourse of the triply marginalized—the Indian, the servant the woman” (264). Rather than reducing meal preparation to an innate knowledge divined by all true women, the kitchen becomes a veritable reservoir of creative and magical events, in which the cook who possesses this talent becomes artist, healer, and lover. Culinary activity involves not just the combination of prescribed ingredients, but something personal and creative emanating from the cook, a magical quality which transforms the food and grants it powerful properties that go beyond physical satisfaction to provide spiritual nourishment as well. Artist and art become one and the same, as Tita’s tears, breast milk, and blood channel emotional properties into the food she prepares. Thus, Tita’s tears of sorrow that fall into her sister’s wedding cake cause members of the wedding party to become wretchedly sad and violently ill. When Pedro gives Tita a bouquet of roses, blood caused by thorn pricks falls from her skin onto the petals, which are then used in the dinner that evening. The blood of passion and repressed desire consumes the family at dinner. Each bite of food becomes sexual ecstasy, eventually causing Tita’s sister, Gertrudis, to rush to take a cold shower to stop the burning passion that only makes the water evaporate before it reaches her skin.

This scene, in particular, emphasizes the manner in which Esquivel eroticizes the kitchen and subverts the traditional association of the kitchen with women’s subjugation or with maternal nurturing (Loewenstein 605). As Tita literally stimulates Pedro’s appetite for love, the English expression “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” is seen in a new light. Esquivel explains that cooking becomes an “inversion of the couple’s sexual role” and that “this is how woman can, in fact, penetrate the man, this is how it converts, and the man is the passive one” (Loewenstein 605).

It is noteworthy that Esquivel goes beyond gender in redefining the role of the domestic kitchen goddess. Unlike Tita, Gertrudis and Rosaura are bereft of any culinary talents. In a reversal of male/female roles, when Gertrudis, after rising to power as an officer in the Revolution, returns to visit the family home, she charges one of her very masculine soldiers to whip up one of her favorite foods. After much consternation over the recipe, he indeed assumes the role of cook extraordinaire, and exudes as much pride and boasting over his fritters as he would over his prowess on the battlefield.

As Esquivel redefines the kitchen, she also revises the concept of family, providing a new image, not based on blood lines but on true emotional attachment. In one poignant scene, when Rosaura is unable to breastfeed her newborn baby, Tita finds milk flowing magically from her own breasts to feed the child. Pedro enters the room and stands over the woman who should have been his wife and the child that should have been their child. The scene seems to portray the typical family unit, but, in fact, is one which is not structured through the socially prescribed relations of blood. The emotional bond that exceeds the societal framework is strengthened as Tita becomes like a mother to both of Rosaura’s children, in many ways caring for them, loving them, and protecting them from the social injustices to which she herself was subjected. This definition of motherhood, freed from the restraints of biological birth, becomes particularly compelling, given that Tita’s own mother is the evil villainess of the novel who constantly seeks to thwart Tita’s attempts to be free of her authority. In fact, the old Indian cook, Nacha, is to Tita the mother that her own biological mother is not.

If the romance novel represents the evolving social identity of the heroine through submission to the masculine superiority of the hero, in Como agua para chocolate it is within the mother-daughter relations that Esquivel redirects the formula. Instead of gaining strength of identity through submission, Tita navigates her personal development through rebellion that leads to autonomy. The novel’s presentation of the mother as evil suggests the problems of individuation that confront a daughter as she attempts to establish her independence. The turmoil engendered by this conflict increases when the daughter attempts to follow the social prescription of loving a maternal figure who suffocates her daughter’s attempts to achieve autonomy. In Como agua para chocolate, Tita’s mother is cold, domineering, and heartless in regard to her daughter’s desire for happiness. So strong is her control and so firm her prohibition against Pedro replacing her as the center of Tita’s life, that she continues to haunt her daughter even after death. Tita, who by now has established sexual relations with Pedro, is harshly condemned by her mother’s ghost for violating the social laws regarding adultery and sex outside of marriage. It is only when Tita voices her true feelings to her dead mother, namely that she indeed hates her, that she finally becomes free of the ghost. In fact, unlike the conventional romance novel, Tita eventually establishes an identity of independence, strength of will, and sureness of self outside of the socio-legal structures that society imposes upon the achievement of ideal femininity.

In addition to the exaggeration of narrative elements, the redefinition of character and space, and the overturning of socio-legal codes, the novel also parodies the force of obstacles that separate the hero and heroine from fulfilling their romantic destiny of love and marriage. Although the conventional romance novel places the conflict between the two lovers, Esquivel resituates the narrative tension between society and the two lovers. As already mentioned, the opposition of Tita’s mother and Pedro’s marriage to Rosaura effectively keeps the two lovers apart. However, because Pedro clings to society’s demands, not only do the two not escape the obstacles to their happiness by running away, they do not even marry after Rosaura’s death, since it is considered socially inappropriate. Throughout the novel, the two are continually reminded that the eyes of society are upon them, keeping them in check and within the boundaries of prescribed behavior. However, the most serious obstacle occurs when they finally freely spend their first night together in the empty home after Pedro’s daughter marries. After the ardent struggle through several decades to finally fulfill their destiny, they transcend society’s legal codes and, as if it were their own first night together, they have sexual intercourse, only to have Pedro die immediately afterwards. But since this is romance, where love reigns stronger than all impediments, Tita causes her own death and finds Pedro waiting for her. Parodying the final scenes of happy lovers heading off into the sunset and into marriage, this happy couple walks off into death, forever free of societal restrictions. To borrow Kathleen Glenn’s words, “Tita and Pedro ultimately die of love(making)” (43), fulfilling a literalization of figurative speech that serves to further subvert the prescriptions of romance literature.

Esquivel not only parodies the excesses of the romantic formula by highlighting the social prescriptions that motivate romance narratives, but she also works to recover the figure of woman behind these prescriptive excesses. By placing her narrative within the context of the Mexican Revolution, Esquivel retrieves the long forgotten diversity of female participation in the armed conflict. Although Tita is situated within the home, more specifically the kitchen, as demanded by her authoritarian mother who insists on absolute obedience, her sister Gertrudis flees the domestic world and enters the masculine, public domain of war and leadership, where she trades her spatula for a revolver, the kitchen for the battlefield, and tradition for change. As a background presence in the novel, the Revolution suggests the revolt, liberation, and empowerment that Tita desires throughout the novel and that Gertrudis successfully gains. Ibsen suggests that by situating Como agua para chocolate against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, Esquivel brings to her work “a specific historical moment in which nineteenth-century values of the Porfiriato were overturned” (139). By placing the armed revolt within the context of female domesticity and frustration, Esquivel defines as a political act Gertrudis’s revolt against her mother and the repressive demands of a rigid society. Gertrudis is successful not only in escaping the preordained female domesticity demanded by society, but she also achieves success in the male world, where might makes right, as she rapidly distinguishes herself as a generala of the Revolution and commands a regiment of men.

Nevertheless, it is notable that Esquivel does not just reverse male/female social roles, for example when Treviño, one of Gertrudis’s soldiers, assumes the role of the domestic kitchen goddess that she herself is not. In fact, the author recovers a historical reality of women in the Mexican Revolution that has disappeared within the mythologizing and romanticizing of the male revolutionary figures. The term soldadera, referring to female participants in the Revolution, became popular in Mexico in 1519, during the Spanish Conquest. Although commonly used to refer to a servant who would use the Spanish soldier’s soldada, or salary, to buy provisions, soldadera was later used to refer to women who participated in war either as followers or as armed participants. Historically, the participation of women in the Mexican Revolution was historically quite varied, ranging from those who fought as well as or better than male revolutionaries and who, with the rank of colonel or general, commanded regiments, to those who accompanied the soldiers as paid servants, cooking and scavenging for food, or serving as prostitutes. Juan González A. Alpuche describes a varied corps of women involved in the Revolution. He includes “La Valentina,” modest and domestic; the wanton “La Cucaracha,” “a woman for all, who gave her liquor and love with open hands;” “Juana Gallo,” “a woman with fighting in her heart;” “La Adelita,” the sweetheart of the troops, adorable and faithful (cited in Salas 82). However, the diversity of roles and social backgrounds has been eclipsed and replaced by the single submissive and sweet-natured figure of La Adelita, or polarized by contrasting the beloved Adelita with the sexually promiscuous Cucaracha.

The presence as well as the disappearance of the independent and active female soldadera is embedded in Mexico’s historical tradition of women warriors, appearing as far back as the pre-Columbian Mexicas. The dual role of warrior/mother appeared frequently during the continuous armed conflicts that have characterized Mexican history. For instance, Toci, the oldest of the Earth Mother goddesses from the Valley of Mexico is at times depicted with a broom in one hand and a shield in the other (Salas 2). Nevertheless, as Elizabeth Salas reports, the most common representation of Toci became the figure of Yaocihuatl, the Enemy Woman, a negative figure which represented the attempt of later male states to discredit the power of female warriors. Eventually the dual portrayal of woman as warrior/Mother reappeared in the form of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who served both as a maternal saint and as a battle icon during the uprising against Spanish colonial rule (Salas 24). Salas maintains that the recuperation of the dual nature of this female icon legitimized for numerous Mexican women the combination of domesticity and military defense (25). Moreover, Salas continues, women often viewed their participation in war as a method of their own “intimate suppressed rebellion which could be beautifully justified in the light of revolutionary struggle” (25).

During the war, military rhetoric and practice strongly disfavored women, and some leaders, such as Pancho Villa, intensely disapproved of the soldaderas, accusing them of being the “chief cause of vice, illness, crime and disorder” (Gen. Joaquín Amaro, Minister of War, Salas 49). Nevertheless, numerous women, from various social classes took up arms, either disguised as men or as spies who could pass without great suspicion. Many legends evolved from the famous deeds and valor of such women. For example, when the male governor of Guerrero, hearing that the famed female revolutionary officer Margarita Neri was coming to his town, hid in a crate and had himself shipped elsewhere (Soto 28). Several women received nicknames which heralded their military skill, such as María Pistolas and Echa Balas. However, since history, myth, and public opinion—that is, male opinion—disregarded female military participation during the Revolution, women rarely received veteran’s compensation, and instead were categorized as wives or mothers, the value of whose domestic work fell outside of military nationalism.

Despite their numerous contributions and involvement, Mexican women continue to be excised from history, their roles preempted at times in ironic ways. For example, in Puebla the yearly celebration of the defeat of the French in that town largely by female soldaderas ironically permits only men to participate in the reenactment of the battle. While females are relegated to the sidelines, Puebla males dress as soldaderas, each carrying a basket of food and water, a rifle, and a doll on his back (Salas 34).

In short, the diversity of female participants in the Mexican Revolution has been eclipsed and reduced to two common stereotypes: the submissive servant and the erotic enticer. Within this context, Esquivel’s presentation of Gertrudis’s escape from domesticity into war, where she successfully rises through the ranks, restores the image of the warrior woman that has been eliminated from history and myth. The author presents Gertrudis as a possible vicarious surrogate of Tita. While Tita struggles within the limiting and imprisoning role imposed by her mother and ultimately by society in general, Gertrudis resists the prescriptive and nullifying constraints imposed against females, and forges a path through a world thought to belong to men.

In an interview, Esquivel proposes the women of Como agua para chocolate as symbolic of the varied nature and changing history of women. Mamá Elena represents a masculine component of repression, “outside of intimacy, life, and earth” (Loewenstein 594). Like her mother, Rosaura, the oldest daughter, insists on tradition, negating any change. For Esquivel, Gertrudis enacts the first stage of feminism, complete sexual freedom that demands a complete breaking away from traditional feminine removal from sexual desire and fulfillment. Beatriz González Stephan juxtaposes the feudal, patriarchal tradition of censorship and coercive norms represented by Mamá (and later by Rosaura) with “las fuerzas liberadoras del eros, del cuerpo cuyo espacio es la cocina, lugar del arte popular de la mesa” (211). Esquivel weaves together the political and the sexual in the figure of Gertrudis, she who represents the most sexually liberated character of the novel, and who directly intercedes in the war waged around the family.

Although Gertrudis wages war in the public domain, Tita locates her rebellion within the space of home, eventually achieving liberation in the private sphere, engendering a new generation of women. Reminiscent of Isabel Allende’s Alba and Alba’s soon-to-be-born daughter at the end of La casa de los espíritus, Esquivel notes that Esperanza portrays collective hope for the future. Esperanza, states the author, will have a balance of public and private worlds, in which respect for family and the kitchen will be threaded with new possibilities for creation in the world outside of the home (Loewenstein 594).

In Como agua para chocolate, Esquivel parodies the social codes of the romance novel that enable the production of prescriptive domesticity and loss of feminine individuality. The novel’s narrative world, spiced with food analogies, suggests the consumption of women by these formulas. By parodying romance structures that consume female individuality, Esquivel exposes the formulaic prescription of the patriarchal domestication of women that, in effect, constrains feminine identity. Therefore, Tita’s struggles within the limiting and imprisoning role imposed by her mother and ultimately by society in general can be resolved only in death. However, Gertrudis rebelliously resists the prescriptive and nullifying constraints imposed against females. She enters a male world, arming herself with sexuality, violence, resistance, and authority where she reclaims history from myth.

Works Cited

Allende, Isabel. La casa de los espíritus. 5th ed. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1973.

Alpuche, Juan A. “La Revolución.” Artes de México 14, 88–89 (1967): 65. (Cited in Salas 82).

Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. Trans. Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

Glenn, Kathleen. “Postmodern Parody and Culinary-Narrative Art in Como agua para chocolate.Chasqui 23, 2 (November 1994): 39–47.

González Stephan, Beatriz. “Para comerte mejor: Cultura calibanesca y formas literarias alternativas,” Nuevo Texto Crítico 5, 9–10 (1992): 201–215.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody. New York: Methuen, 1985.

Ibsen, Kristine. “On Recipes, Reading and Revolution: Postboom Parody in Como agua para chocolate.Hispanic Review 63, 2 (Spring 1995): 133–146.

Lawless, Cecilia. “Experimental Cooking in Como agua para chocolate.Monographic Review/Revista Monográfica 8 (1992): 261–272.

Loewenstein, Claudia. “Revolución interior al exterior: An Interview with Laura Esquivel.” Trans. Anne Marie Wiseman. Southwest Review 79, 4 (Autumn 1994): 592–607.

Modleski, Tania. Loving With A Vengeance. New York: Routledge, 1982.

Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Salas, Elizabeth. Soldaderas in the Mexican Military. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Soto, Shirlene Ann. The Mexican Woman: A Study of Her Participation in the Revolution, 1919–1940. R&E Research Associates: Palo Alto, 1979.

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