Of all the novels to come out of Latin America, Laura Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate (1989) is surely one of the most commercially successful. The same may be said of its cinematic counterpart, which was directed by the novelist's then husband Alfonso Arau in 1992, when Arau wrote a screenplay that faithfully emulated the structure and spirit of his wife's work. The film was, to a large extent, responsible for the regeneration of the Mexican film industry, as the country's most commercially successful film of the decade of its release. The statistics are now familiar: the book was the second best-selling novel in Mexico in the year of its publication and its English translation rocketed into the New York Times best-seller list in 1993 and remained there for a significant period. It has already been translated into twenty-nine different languages. The film, clearly boosted by sales of the novel, won eighteen international awards and was the highest-grossing foreign language film in the U.S. in 1993.

There were several reasons for this phenomenal success. The book contained all the right ‘ingredients’: a fast flowing plot, a heart-wrenching love story, an original yet familiar structure (the cookery-book ‘mode’) and, last, but most certainly not least, a tablespoon of magic. It is this last element that has led critics to speak of Like Water for Chocolate as a work of magical realism. Yet little more than a second glance at either the text or the film reveals that these works go entirely against the grain of the revolutionary ethos associated with magical realism. Esquivel's employment of elements of magic bolsters an entirely reactionary ideology that serves to reinforce patriarchal stereotypes of femininity and condone the master-slave dialectic, whilst fetishising Mexican identity. In the absence of the transgressive and subversive impulses that Parkinson Zamora and Faris speak of, the works of Laura Esquivel and Alfonso Arau reinforce the ‘traditional’ boundaries of gender, race and class. In fact, they reveal more about the ways in which Europeans, Americans and even urban middleclass Mexicans wish to perceive Mexican rural reality. The prevailing ideology of the text is conservative, so it follows that Like Water for Chocolate differs from the majority of other magical-realist narratives in that it is not intrinsically postcolonial.