In Laura Esquivel’s novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate), published in 1989, Tita learns to cook from Nacha, the family’s cook. “Ella le enseña las bondades y los secretos de la cocina” (She teaches her the virtues and the secrets of cooking).
literature
The Earthquake of 1985
On September 19, 1985, an earthquake struck Mexico City. According to experts quoted by TV Azteca, “miles de voluntarios se movilizaron para rescatar víctimas, repartir víveres y brindar refugio” (thousands of volunteers mobilized to rescue victims, distribute food and provide shelter). In the first days, the government had been completely overwhelmed.
In No sin nosotros, his chronicle of the days of the earthquake, Carlos Monsiváis wrote that civil society “encabeza, convoca y distribuye la solidaridad” (leads, calls together and distributes solidarity).
Sister Filotea
At the end of 1690, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, bishop of Puebla, printed a critique by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz under the title Carta atenagórica. He added a letter of his own that urged her to concentrate on divine studies and reduce the human ones.
He signed the letter “Sor Filotea de la Cruz,” a nun’s name. According to the edition published by the government of the State of Mexico, “Fernández de Santa Cruz no quiso que la admonición se interpretara como surgida de su potestad episcopal” (did not want the warning to be read as coming from his authority as bishop).
Sor Juana answered on March 1, 1691, with the Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz, addressed to the pseudonym.
Literary Skulls
Calaveras literarias, “literary skulls,” are verses written for the Day of the Dead. National Geographic calls them the Day of the Dead tradition that mocks death. They are “epigramas o versos rítmicos de rima variada cuyo motivo principal es la muerte” (epigrams or rhythmic verses with varied rhyme whose main subject is death).
The first ones were published in 1879 in El Socialista, a newspaper of Guadalajara. In the early 1940s, the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a collective of printmakers, promoted them.
They Have Given Us the Land
In Juan Rulfo’s story “Nos han dado la tierra,” from El Llano en llamas (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1953), the government gives a group of peasants land on a dry and barren plain. The official dismisses their complaints and hands them papers. One of the peasants says: “No, el llano no es cosa que sirva” (No, the plain is good for nothing).
The Promise to a Dying Mother
Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo (1955) begins with a promise. Juan Preciado travels to Comala to find his father, Pedro Páramo, because he promised his dying mother that he would.
Making Somebody Nobody
In El laberinto de la soledad, Octavio Paz recalls the answer of a maid who was asked who was in the next room: “No es nadie, señor, soy yo” (It is nobody, sir, it is me).
In the same chapter, “Máscaras mexicanas,” Paz describes el ninguneo: “El ninguneo es una operación que consiste en hacer de Alguien, Ninguno” (Ninguneo is an operation that consists of making Somebody into Nobody).
Sensei’s Testament
In Natsume Sōseki’s novel Kokoro, the narrator tells Sensei that he wants to learn from Sensei’s past. Sensei presses him: Anata wa hontō ni majime nan desu ka. “Are you really serious?” His past, he says, has taught him to doubt people, and he doubts the narrator too. But before he dies, he wants to trust another person, even just one.
He then agrees to tell the narrator his whole past. In his testament, he gives the reason: the narrator was serious and wanted a living lesson from life itself. Sensei writes that he is now breaking open his own heart to pour its blood on the narrator’s face.
Hats for the Jizō
In the folk tale Kasa Jizō, a poor old man cannot sell his straw hats in town on New Year’s Eve. On the way home through a snowstorm, he sees six Jizō statues and puts the unsold hats on them. There are only five hats, so he takes off his own hat and puts it on the last statue.
On the morning of New Year’s Day, the old couple find rice bales piled up at their house, full of New Year decorations, rice cakes, fish and other food. A parenting site calls it a folk tale that everyone knows, and notes that many elementary schools still use it in Japanese lessons.
Kamo no Chōmei’s Hut
Around 1212, Kamo no Chōmei completed Hōjōki, An Account of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut. The hut he describes measured one jō, about three meters, on each side, and was seven shaku, about two meters, high.
The pillars were joined with tenons, and the walls were held with latches. The hut stood on a base frame instead of posts set into the ground. An architectural study of the hut notes that this structure assumes the building will be moved. Its materials were carried on two oxcarts.