Como Água para chocolate (1993): uma leitura decolonial

Abstract

The novel Como Água para Chocolate (1993), by the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel, features the female character Tita, who is the youngest of three sisters, as its protagonist. The matriarch, Mama Elena, is an extremely rigid woman and behaves in the narrative along the lines of the patriarchalism prevailing in the early 20th century in Latin America. As the youngest, Tita is haunted by Mexican and family tradition, for which the youngest daughter cannot marry, as she has to take care of her parents until their death. Following this thread of the novel, this master's dissertation aims to develop a decolonial reading of the work in order to expose episodes that portray and denounce oppressions still in force in the system, such as: patriarchy, exploitation of the native population with unpaid domestic work, use of tradition for the maintenance of power, coloniality of being, knowledge and power, sociocultural resources that represent the social struggle in Latin America, such as magical realism, for example, among other aspects that literature has the ability to represent while which reveals so many problems. In this context of investigation, with a view to having in the literary text a support for social change, concepts consistent with the decolonial proposal of making/reading Latin American literature will be analyzed: magical realism as a form of resistance to the dictates of still colonizing power, colonialities, borders, traditions, cultural maintenance, cultural exploitation, decoloniality among others, in order to fulfill the objective of analyzing the tradition of patriarchy, via selected corpus, and its consequences, highlighting the submission of women inserted in such a context present in the exposed family in the narrative, with modes and values, which are passed from generation to generation; although it is not exclusively a feminist research, the issues of feminist criticism and decolonial feminism act as sub-themes, since we have female characters in the spotlight. The research methodology to be used makes a bibliographical approach of literary and theoretical-critical sources as a support for all the reflections that we intend and, for that, we will use key intellectuals for the Latin American context, such as: Quijano, Mignolo, Barzotto, Lugones, Schmidt, Santos, Maia, Figueiredo and many others, as well as their current concepts and perspectives in the face of the representative role of literature for family, social and cultural issues of this interchangeable contact zone called Latin America.