SOURCE: “Como agua para chocolate and the Question of Viable Alternatives to Technologies of Domination,” in Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura, Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring, 1997, pp. 112–27.

In the following essay, Hoeg studies the importance of the “gringo” scientist, Dr. John Brown, in Como agua para chocolate.

In Becoming a Scientist in Mexico: The Challenge of Creating a Scientific Community in an Underdeveloped Country, Jacqueline Fortes and Larissa Adler Lomnitz paint a rather gloomy picture of the possibility of developing a ‘critical scientific mass’ in Mexico or, indeed, in any Latin American country. The specific reasons given are many, but essentially the problem revolves around a negative cultural perception of the scientific ethos, since “science did not result from internal development; it is an imported cultural product” (161). This view is echoed in a whole host of recent studies (Hernández-Boada; Martinez; Peritore; Sutz). The consensus seems to...