Early in 2019, a year after the publication of her multiply award-winning YA novel-in-verse The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo spoke with Listín Diario about the subject matter of her next book. With the Fire on High, she said, would be “una historia de una madre adolescente afropuertorriqueña que vive en Filadelfia y que sueña con ser una cocinera. Su comida tiene propiedades mágicas, pero por la situación de su familia no siente que pueda cumplir su sueño. Es parecido a ‘Como agua para chocolate’, pero en el barrio” (Acevedo & Pichardo, 2019). The text that Acevedo was referencing, of course, was Laura Esquivel’s 1989 novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate), which critics have alternately described as “a political protest of abuse against women” that stresses “woman’s political power and desire” (Perez, 2009, pp. 199, 201) and as an apology for “neo-liberal policies” that “upholds the ideals of [a] bourgeois readership/audience” (Martínez, 2004, p. 40) about class, indigeneity, and perhaps even gender. The comparison between the two books was one that bloggers, journalists, teachers, and librarians would also subsequently make after Acevedo’s novel was published, as commentators writing on behalf of publications and organizations ranging from HipLatina (Isaad, 2019) to the Washington, DC Public Library (2020) clamored to recommend that readers who had loved Esquivel’s novel pick up Acevedo’s—and vice versa.Footnote 1

I take Acevedo’s commentary as an invitation to readers to look back at Esquivel’s most famous and at times quite controversial work: to think through how Acevedo’s YA novel, as a rewriting of Como agua para chocolate, deepens, innovates on, and in some ways course-corrects the revolutionary path of this earlier text. I am especially interested in interrogating how Acevedo and Esquivel confront the politics of language as source material for political resistance and healing: processes that unfold alongside and often separately from the culinary art-making that is most obviously at the forefront of these books. Acevedo, like Esquivel before her, represents multilingual identities and politically significant forms of “linguistic hybridity” (Aparicio, qtd. in Lateef-Jan, 2018, p. 9) in ways that disrupt and resist the colonial operations of a United States whose historical relationship to the rest of the hemisphere has been defined by military and economic violence as well as paternalism and pretenses to cultural superiority.Footnote 2 Yet With the Fire on High works differently in that it centers the multilingual perspective of a multiply marginalized heritage language speaker—a heroine whose linguistic story, Acevedo affirms, is more than worthy of being told. In joining the legions of Latinx writers who have made these sorts of thematic engagements, Acevedo rewrites not just Esquivel’s story of a young woman’s culinary power but also her more implicit commentaries on the sociopolitical importance of language use, linguistic “mastery,” and the act of claiming a multilingual identity for oneself in contravention to colonial or neocolonial expectations.

Neither the above-cited Perez nor Martínez has turned out to be alone within the critical conversation about Como agua para chocolate and its contributions to Esquivel’s body of activist labor.Footnote 3 Martínez has been joined by Helene Price and Maite Zubiaurre, whose essays similarly characterize the novel as an “essentialist and conservative love story” that shows “no profound awareness of the political and social conditions operating during the Mexican Revolution” (Price, 2005, p. 190) and that maintains “the social and racial hierarchy prevalent in the outside world” within “the domestic realm” of Tita’s fictional kitchen (Zubiaurre, 2006, p. 31).Footnote 4 Meanwhile, Perez’s 2009 commentary on Esquivel’s methods of “political protest” echoes Cristina Ortiz’s 1996 reading, which interprets the novel’s protagonist, Tita de la Garza, as empowered by her creator to resist damaging expressions of patriarchal and literary normativity and control: “Frente a la austeridad y represión que indica El manual [de Carreño] o el canon, Tita opone su universo hedonista y sensual. … Sus platos y su libro de recetas le permiten transformar la pasividad impuesta y constituirse en sujeto activo” (p. 126).Footnote 5 Perez’s arguments have also echoed and anticipated those of Anna Marie Sandoval and Lily Martinez Evangelista, who characterize the novel as “parodying” and undermining the gender and ethnoracial “stereotypes [Esquivel] presents” (Sandoval, 2008, p. 58) while supplying “alternative gender constructions that incorporate erotic expression” (Evangelista, 2020, p. 98).Footnote 6 Somewhere in the middle lie critics including Dianna C. Niebylski, who argues that Tita “can hardly be considered a model of liberation or revolt” in her embrace of “the traditional role of women who cook and serve,” but who does locate moments when “images of carnivalesque rowdiness or eroticism unsettle and sometimes undermine the narrative’s congenial and compromising tone” (2004, p. 36 − 8, italics in the original). As Sandoval’s word choice indicates, underlying these dramatically different readings are not just competing conceptions of domestic spaces and their implications for questions of gender, as well as dueling notions of what exactly constitutes “un modelo social más democrático e inclusivo” (Zanetta, 2014, p. 168) within the ethnoracial and socioeconomic contexts of contemporary Mexican fiction, but also differing interpretations of the novel’s potentially satirical impulses.Footnote 7

This richly unfolding conversation has created a complex contextual backdrop for Acevedo’s reference to Como agua para chocolate as a sort of “comp title” for her then-forthcoming novel.Footnote 8 In stressing the difference in setting between the two texts, Acevedo has pointedly gestured toward the political interventions of YA novels that center Afro-Latina protagonists from “el barrio” rather than privileging a “bourgeois” perspective through their choice of heroine (Martínez, 2004, p. 33).Footnote 9 Most importantly for this essay, this shift in focus is mirrored in Acevedo’s approach to multilingualism. In Esquivel, representations of multilingual characters with “perfect” fluency in English prove central to a subtle but politically resistive critique of the United States’ history of military and economic violence against México—yet the book’s engagement with marginalized languages, specifically Otomí, is executed in a manner that threatens to reinscribe rather than dismantle the traumatizing ethnoracial and class hierarchies passed down via colonial history. In contrast, multilingualism in Acevedo’s novel works more systemically to intervene in and undermine such established matrices of power. Acevedo participates in a project of linguistic resistance and healing that involves reclaiming a heritage language for a multiply marginalized protagonist and, through that act of reclamation, rejecting the received cultural wisdom propagated by both colonial and neocolonial systems. Considering how these two books engage with the politics of language underscores not only the political importance of Esquivel’s original narrative but the ways in which rewritings like With the Fire on High manage to go further and the reasons why this matters.

(Counter-)Revolutions: Multilingualism and Resistance in Esquivel

A reader could easily be forgiven for thinking that multilingualism as a thematic preoccupation is absent from Como agua para chocolate, since references to languages other Spanish are few and far between. Nevertheless, it is for precisely this reason that I am interested in teasing out the currents of meaning that stem from Esquivel’s references to both English and Otomí. Intriguing thematic implications of these references emerge as early as the novel’s first mention of English, in a scene where Tita’s mother orchestrates the departure of her first love, Pedro Muzquiz, from México. About Pedro, she comments, “Puede entrar a trabajar como contador en la compañía de mi primo, no tendrá problema, pues habla el inglés a la perfección” (Esquivel, 1989, p. 67). By stressing the “perfection” of Pedro’s multilingual skills, Esquivel simultaneously highlights several realities: the relationship of power between English and Spanish against a backdrop of both military and economic aggression, which makes competence in the neocolonial language a strategic necessity as well as a marker of class privilege and perhaps a signal of cultural assimilation that the novel might be read as satirizing. Price’s concern about the narrative’s apparent neglect of “the political and social conditions operating during the Mexican Revolution” is more than understandable. Yet there are also subtle but important traces of acknowledgement here of the United States’ violent takeover of so much Mexican territory in the mid-nineteenth century and its subsequent “economic domination of… Mexico” over the course of “more than a century” (Gonzalez & Fernandez, 2003, p. xi). Esquivel offers up a relatively apolitical rationale for Pedro’s impending departure from México, one that has more to do with family drama than with socioeconomics despite Mama Elena’s claims that San Antonio will offer his family “mejor atención médica” (Esquivel, 1989, p. 67). Set against this narrative backdrop, the reference to multilingualism functions as an important reminder of the transnational power dynamics that underlie the narrative: it vivifies and invites a critique of the reach of “US neocolonial imperialism” and what Yolanda Padilla calls a “history of national permeability that will continue to shape the Mexican future” (2011, p. 84).

Another notable moment along the same lines comes near the close of the novel, in a scene that will help to decide the romantic future of Esquivel’s protagonist as she reveals over dinner that she is unsure whether she can marry John Brown, the would-be savior bent on rescuing her from the indeterminacy of her relationship with Pedro. John’s complex family history notwithstanding,Footnote 10 Esquivel tends to cast him as a tongue-in-cheek representative of Anglo-American “rationality”: in one moment her narrator, Tita’s great-niece, refers to him as “John, la paz, la serenidad, la razón” (Esquivel, 2012, p. 121). The reference is so exaggeratively blatant as to be humorous, satirizing the specious association of white US culture with science, reason, and “development” and making an important point for a narrative that as recently as 2000 would be discussed in US textbooks like the problematically titled Literature of Developing Nations for Students.Footnote 11 Read against the backdrop of these tongue-in-cheek characterizations, Tita’s encounter with John’s visiting aunt takes on an interesting political significance that is heightened by the two women’s relationships to language. The aunt compliments Tita on her command of English; like Pedro, John’s fiancée is to be commended “por el perfecto inglés que hablaba” (p. 155). Aunt Mary’s praise satirically echoes the patronizing astonishment of English speakers at the multilingual talents of native speakers of other languages that they perceive as being lower in status than their own. This dynamic acquires additional significance when read historically within the context of the Mexican Revolution, which US ideological forces treated as a rationale for peddling cultural stereotypes of Mexican identity as “irresponsible” and “childish” (De Orellana, 1993, p. 10; Naylor, 1997, p. 166). Tita’s competence in English functions as a linguistic repudiation of these mythologies, while the US visitor, in her amazement at Tita’s talents, telegraphs a familiar attitude of condescension. Aunt Mary’s monolingual identity, meanwhile, serves as another marker of the asymmetrical power relationship between the United States and México: unlike Pedro and Tita, John’s aunt can only read lips in English because she has had no need to learn Spanish, a “minority language in the United States” that has already been the target of longstanding “real and symbolic violence” (MacGregor-Mendoza, 2020, p. 267) by the early-twentieth-century moment in which the narrative is set.

At a more symbolic level of interpretation, the position of English relative to Spanish in the narrative allows for the development of a resistive impulse within it. Within the trajectory of the novel’s plot, English is the language of separation and heartbreak—in the form of Pedro’s separation from Tita—while Spanish functions as the language of disclosure in which Tita, for instance, reveals to John that she has had extramarital sex with Pedro. Some audiences for the book, and the film into which it was made, have seemed to exercise a kind of knee-jerk second-wave thinking in dismissing as “conservative” Tita’s pursuit of romantic love with Pedro and her desire to care for the children that he has with her sister. A more generous contemporary reading might situate Esquivel’s protagonist within a transnational and multicultural tradition of women in the Americas seeking against the odds to decide whether, when, and how they become mothers and romantic partners: a feat that Tita arguably attempts by refusing the imperatives that she relinquish Pedro, observe the “sanctity” of sex within marriage, and leave the mothering to Rosaura.Footnote 12 Either way, it is significant that Tita’s uses of Spanish allow for emotional self-disclosure and self-actualization as she ultimately defines it, whereas English tends to enter into the text together with estrangement from, rather than fulfillment of, the desires of the self. This symbolic suite of associations cleverly disrupts the mythologizing North American cultural narrative in which English is figured as the language of liberation, opportunity, and empowerment, allowing Esquivel to resist stale notions of US cultural superiority.

Yet Spanish, as a colonial language in its own right, has an obvious double-edged significance in Esquivel’s novel. Here is where it is most important to really interrogate the counter-revolutionary limitations on the text’s approach to multilingualism: ones that will illuminate the need for books like Acevedo’s to go further and do more. Consider, especially, the novel’s one direct reference to Otomí (Esquivel, 2012, p. 111), in a scene that again centers on Tita’s engagement to John. Esquivel’s narrator relates how

[e]l compromiso quedó formalizado cuando John le hizo entrega a Tita de un hermoso anillo de brillantes. Tita observó largamente cómo lucía en su mano. Los destellos que se desprendían de él, la hicieron recordar el fulgor en los ojos de Pedro momentos antes, cuando la miraba desnuda, y vino a su mente un poema otomí que Nacha le había enseñado de niña:

En la gota de rocío brilla el sol

la gota de rocío se seca

en mis ojos, los míos, brillas tú

yo, yo vivo…. (111, italics in the original)

Although this reference to the “poema otomí” suggests the continuing intergenerational and intercultural transmission of Indigenous knowledge and telegraphs both Tita’s and Esquivel’s reverence for that knowledge, the actual linguistic details of the poem’s presentation to readers are troublesome. Readers are told that this is an Otomí poem, but the text is presented exclusively in Spanish rather than, for instance, being reproduced in Otomí with an accompanying Spanish translation. The decision to only reference and not interact more substantively with the Indigenous language raises ethical questions about tokenization and reinforces a power dynamic in which it is expected that Spanish will dominate rather than being represented more equally alongside its Indigenous alternatives. It introduces an additional, linguistic rationale for readings that interpret Como agua para chocolate as presenting “no more than caricatures” of Indigenous secondary characters and the communities to which they belong (Muñoz, qtd. in Shaw, 2003, p. 68).

Notably, Esquivel herself seems to have recognized the importance of this omission of Otomí; her El diario de Tita, published in 2013 and pitched as a kind of epistolary accompaniment to the original novel, does almost exactly what I suggested above, although it still presents the text of the poem first in Spanish and then in the Indigenous language. Despite or even because of its own limitations, Esquivel’s indirect revision of her earlier work suggests the need for alternatives and amendments to the original narrative’s political project, including its treatment of issues of ethnoracial and class identity as they intersect with multilingualism.

Taking Things Further: Acevedo’s Linguistic Interventions

In a clear search for these alternatives and amendments, Acevedo’s With the Fire on High operates differently with regard to multilingualism, foregrounding a “linguistic flexibility” (Durán & Henderson, 2018, p. 76) that is both politically resistive and a source of healing from linguistic and other forms of colonial and neocolonial trauma for multiply marginalized speakers. The concept of linguistic healing, which appears in the pedagogical literature on heritage language teaching as well as in discussions of language revitalization in colonial and neocolonial contexts, is especially relevant to Acevedo’s novel as a narrative of the quest for linguistic self-actualization through increased confidence in and comfort with one’s own multilingual identity.Footnote 13 Along the way, Acevedo takes a drastically different approach to the concept of linguistic “mastery” and its political implications. Unlike Esquivel’s narrative, With the Fire on High explores what it means not to assert one’s “perfect” linguistic skill in contravention to othering and patronizing cultural expectations, but instead to own a perfectly “imperfect,” flexibly hybrid multilingual identity as a form of self-affirmation and a healing practice within a United States that attempts to suppress the use of heritage languages associated with spaces that have been subject to its (neo)colonial influence. While this YA novel shares a raft of similarities with Como agua para chocolate, from its postmodern interpolation of recipes into the narrative to its destigmatizing treatment of young women’s desire for sex, it thus also takes things further than its predecessor, with the linguistic complexities and resistance of “el barrio” as a linchpin of Acevedo’s rewriting. Acevedo’s work in this sense arguably has less in common with Esquivel’s and more in common with an array of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latinx texts—including children’s and YA narratives as well as “adult” literature—that have explored questions of multilingualism from this subversive angle.Footnote 14

Acevedo’s Emoni is a an intricately three-dimensional protagonist with an intersectional array of identities: in addition to being a speaker of more than one language, she is an Afro-Latina protagonist, a teenage mother, a working-class student, and a cultural representative of the Puerto Rican diasporic community in Philadelphia, whose “Caribbean homeland” continues to be enmeshed in dynamics of “colonial subordination” from which the US “has… benefitted inestimably” (Hernández, 2022).Footnote 15 Many of these factors inform and shape the importance of Emoni’s linguistic identity, particularly her struggles speaking the language of her father’s family: “The Latina grandmothers at the Papi store tsk-tsk when they ask me a question in Spanish and I answer with my chopped-up tongue, or worse, in English. And I don’t have enough skills to tell them ’Buela didn’t raise me speaking much Spanish,” she explains (Acevedo, 2019, p. 68). She can “understand a lot of it,” she clarifies, yet this partial fluency in a heritage language makes Emoni feel like “a Bad Boricua” despite the cultural fluency she displays in her cooking. In the narrative moments when she unveils her linguistic insecurities, Emoni displays the same feelings of “linguistic shame and inadequacy” that Kelly Lowther Pereira cites as plaguing unconfident heritage language learners (2018, p. 194), whose incomplete linguistic knowledge too often stems from the dominant culture’s sociopolitical suppression of heritage languages from colonized, formerly colonized, or neocolonial spaces and its inhibition of the transfer of those languages from one generation to the next.Footnote 16 To this dynamic Acevedo adds an acute consciousness of how these problems of insecurity and shame are compounded in a world in which people tend to act as though an Afro-Latina protagonist’s “Puerto Rican side cancels out any Blackness,” rendering it invisible or unreal (2019, p. 68).Footnote 17

At the same time, With the Fire on High refuses to play into the toxic cultural attitudes that, as poet Tiana Clark puts it, treat narratives of “Black women’s suffering” as “more profitable” than stories of Black women’s “happiness” (2018). Instead, in the same way that Acevedo infuses destigmatizing joy and love into a narrative of Afro-Latina teenage motherhood,Footnote 18 she goes to great lengths to show how a multilingual identity might be reclaimed and how this reclamation can be healing. Near the close of the novel, on a week-long study abroad trip to Spain that Emoni has financed through fundraising, there is a pivotal scene in which she and her love interest Malachi are pickpocketed by a little boy. In this scene, Emoni and her readers discover that she can speak—not just understand—Spanish and be perfectly understood, even in a high-pressure situation that might have left her tongue-tied while attempting to conjugate “robar” in the preterit tense. “Porqué robaste la cartera?” she asks the “young boy,” whose “eyes widen” when he realizes that she is Black and can speak Spanish (Acevedo, 2019, pp. 314 − 15).Footnote 19 Although Emoni’s “words [have] come out slow” (p. 315), the successful act of communicating in her heritage language in this moment of stress functions as a specific assertion of her Spanish-speaking Afro-Latina identity and self-identification: something that has become increasingly possible for Emoni to embrace over the course of her short immersion in the atmosphere of Sevilla.

As Emoni realizes with a mixture of surprise and satisfaction that she “must have gotten her question across” (p. 315), readers are likely to remember where Acevedo’s protagonist began at the start of her international sojourn, when she was “not looking forward to breaking out [her] Spanish!” (p. 282). “I only speak that with ’Buela,” she clarifies (p. 282), yet here Emoni has taken a step toward resisting the suppression of her multilingual identity. It is significant that this change happens in the Spanish metropole, where Emoni as a multiply postcolonial subject “flips the script” in small but significant ways, in some sense upending the historical relationship between the colonizer and the exploited colonial space from which profit and enrichment are derived. “We look beautiful and hood and excited to see the world,” Emoni reports on their arrival at the airport (p. 278). The rediscovery and reclamation of language are part of this flipped experience of discovery and exploration, in which Spain ironically gives Acevedo’s heroine what she needs to stand up to a United States that, in its xenophobic and racist responses to linguistic diversity, has alienated her from the language of her abuela and barred her abuela from accessing the potentialities of intergenerational language transmission. Emoni’s voyage abroad, then, allows Acevedo to model a form of linguistic healing that undermines the estrangement of diasporic people from heritage languages and rejects the feelings of shame and insecurity that can result from such estranging and oppressive pressures and policies. This element of the narrative and its political power remain palpable despite the ironic significations of Spanish as a colonial language, which I will address below.

So far, it should be obvious how Acevedo innovates on Esquivel by digging into the complexities of a multilingualism shaped by gaps and suppressions rather than by “perfect” knowledge. To this we can also add the importance of Emoni’s role as first-person narrator-protagonist to Acevedo’s exploration of multilingual identities. As we know, the narrator of Como agua para chocolate is the great-niece of the heroine; for Tita, the “reception and transmission of recipes” (Haveli-Wise, 1997, p. 124) is the only available method of direct communication with readers. In contrast, Acevedo’s narrator-protagonist controls the narrative space of the text, within which she code-switches between English and Spanish unhampered by self-consciousness. Sometimes her multilingual vocabulary is culinarily inclined, as when she explains how she gives food her “special brand of sazón” (Acevedo, 2019, p. 16) or describes how her abuela “peels and crushes the garlic in el pilón” (p. 33). At other times, it becomes a way of accurately describing the neighborhood and its prejudices: “the viejos playing dominos on the corner shook their heads when [she] walked past” while pregnant, she remembers (p. 22). At still other times, Emoni uses code-switching to describe other diasporic communities and their members, like the “Italian abuelitas in South Philly” (p. 35). Importantly, in all of these instances, Emoni refuses to italicize Spanish terms as though they are out of the ordinary.Footnote 20 Acevedo and her narrator thereby decline to create “a false distinction” between English and Spanish that “does not reflect the languaging reality of bilingual Latinx speakers” (Herrera & España, 2022, p. 366).Footnote 21 Facilitated by her role as narrator, Emoni’s linguistic choices give increasing visibility to the multilingualism of her identity. They also counter the “negative attitudes about non-standard varieties and language mixing” that predominate within the United States as a colonial and neocolonial power that fetishizes English and stigmatizes the use of heritage languages by diasporic populations (Fuller & Leeman, 2020, p. 332). In other words, such code-switching can be read both as resistive and as a healing resolution of linguistic trauma.

What remains is to consider how these linguistic questions continue to be complicated by the status of Spanish as a colonial language, one whose history parallels English’s contemporary status as a tool of linguistic oppression with the ability to “maintain… the neoliberal order” in Puerto Rico as elsewhere “across the globe” (Hsu, 2015, p. 128).Footnote 22 I would argue that With the Fire on High more satisfyingly addresses this concern by allowing Emoni to actively interrogate and critique Spain’s historical status as an imperial power, and especially the place of linguistic violence in this history. Confronted with “the tomb of Christopher Columbus” in the Catedral de Sevilla, Emoni doesn’t mince words:

I’ve already told you my father is a big history buff when it comes to PR, and he doesn’t need much prompting to remind me that before Columbus, Puerto Rico was called ‘Borinken’ by the Taíno people who lived there. … [H]ardly anyone remembers the enslaved people who dug through the rivers for that gold, who were there before he arrived. Whose descendants are still there now. (pp. 305–6)

Critical in this passage is Emoni’s awareness of the act of renaming through which Puerto Rico was given a Spanish name to replace its Taíno one. Like Esquivel before her, Acevedo in this scene records a small snapshot of the history of pre-Hispanic languages within the cultural geography of the Americas. More distinctively, however, Acevedo through Emoni’s narration is explicit in calling out the linguistic and other forms of brutality of Spanish colonial violence, while also resisting the mythology of indigeneity as something past rather than persisting. This final example gestures toward how more explicit engagements with pre-colonial linguistic history, even brief ones, can serve a healing function in the reckoning with linguistic and other traumas of a colonial inheritance.

Conclusion

The fact that Acevedo’s novel has been so often mentioned in the same breath as Esquivel’s means something exciting for readers who have already reached for Como agua para chocolate but who might not otherwise have picked up With the Fire on High. Thanks to this chorus of recommendations, readers who have begun with Esquivel are now being pushed to choose and read differently: to pay attention to a YA text by an Afro-Dominican writer with her own linguistically complex set of experiences.Footnote 23 This matters, whether With the Fire on High functions for the new reader as a “window text” or as a “mirror text”: whether it offers the reader access to a perspective different from their own or reflects one or more of the reader’s linguistic identities back at them, legitimating those identities as a focus of literary art.Footnote 24 In either case, Acevedo’s novel moves the conversation in an essential direction: toward necessarily more political modes of thinking about multilingualism, empire, power, and healing in the Americas. While Como agua para chocolate’s subtle and overlooked evocations of multilingual identity function subversively to resist the neocolonial dynamics of oppression that have characterized the relationship between the United States and México, Acevedo foregrounds a different type of multilingualism that is grounded in intersectional experiences of marginalization and serves to challenge the particular power dynamics implicated in them. More specifically, With the Fire on High presents its audience with a progressively more powerful heroine whose gradual embrace of her complex linguistic identity offers an accessible blueprint for circumventing persisting colonial dynamics of linguistic hegemony and for healing from intergenerational linguistic trauma.