In 1992, director Alfonso Arau released the film Como Agua Para Chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate), based on his then wife Laura Esquivel’s poetic 1989 novel. When I saw the film long ago, it moved me deeply, showing me a part of Mexico I’d never seen and at the same time telling me a story that I recognized within myself. This summer, as the film celebrated its 30th anniversary, a trend emerged that feels like it could have existed in Esquivel’s universe: Mexican girl core.

I came upon this style on TikTok, where I’ve watched video after video of Latina women dressed in Edwardian-era white cotton camisoles, in eyelet and crocheted tops, petticoats, and slips. The women in these clips are breathing life into the romance of slow living in snippets: The whites are being hung to dry; she’s clutching a handful of red roses; she’s in the kitchen. In them I see Tita, the protagonist, living a cloistered life on her family’s ranch with her heart heaving from her chest, emotions unspooling from her fingertips in the kitchen—thoughts and tears flavoring her dishes.

The Like Water for Chocolate references are sometimes explicit: There is the book, opened to the recipe for codornices en pétalos de rosa. The style feels like a cocktail of early 1900s lingerie sensibilities and ’90s flair. White cotton pieces like vintage camisole tops with crochet items, ribbons, and mid- to low-rise skirts took center stage this summer, along with Catholic cross necklaces and rosaries.

This trend pulled me back into the romantic world of Tita, and as I revisited it, I remembered the heartache that came with it. I recalled why I saw part of myself reflected in her, though our situations differed. Her mom controlled and oppressed her, forbidding her to marry so that she could be her caretaker. She kept her from her true love and offered him her older sister’s hand instead. For years, Tita was both physically imprisoned by her mother and held psychologically captive; cooking was a way to release and communicate all the feelings that weren’t allowed to breathe.

Marco Leonardi and Lumi Cavazos in Like Water for Chocolate.

I let my feelings breathe through writing. I journaled endlessly, letting the ink spill the words I could not utter, the grief I could not muster. I filled a cohort of black-and-white composition notebooks, scrawling my life from cover to cover.

Instead of having a romantic relationship with food, the only thing Tita could control, I did the opposite. I abstained from one of my favorite pleasures, developing eating disorders as a way to cope. Willing my body to shrink so that clothes could hang off me, so that I just barely disappeared. So that I didn’t have to think about my body. Because that felt like the only thing I could control.

I was taught to fear the male gaze and its myriad misogynistic expressions. The patriarchy had made a battleground of my body.

As a Mexican woman who was once a Mexican girl, this was, at my core, a deep-seated insecurity, an inability to feel safe. In my city of birth, where kidnappings, ransoms, and assaults were common; where my mom got held up at gunpoint and had her van stolen, which caused for a late pickup at school. In my body, my flesh, the place that so many regard as their temple. In my home. Tita, who lives during the Mexican Revolution, is in similar peril from her outside and inside worlds; both push against her until she cracks.

“The patriarchy had made a battleground of my body.”

The many TikTok creators who took Mexican girl core as an opportunity to speak on their experiences remind me that we’re bound together in our myriad histories as Mexican girls. It’s hard to say which elements of our lives this trend speaks to. Is it our food? Our religion? Our traditional garb? The misogyny we’re subjected to? The fear of being next in a country plagued by femicide?

Conversely, it raises the question, is it finally cool to be Latina? To be Mexican? Maybe it’s cool right now, through the TikTok algorithm while it trends. Maybe it’s cool for white women who appropriate chola culture and rebrand it as “so insert-white-supermodel-here,” or the “clean girl aesthetic,” which Black and Latina women have heralded for years, or the recent “brownie lip.” But in the country I was told to “go back on the horse I rode in on” by a stranger on the street, where Mexican people are deemed “criminals” and seen as labor, will the love for Mexican culture prevail above the fleeting moment of aesthetic?

A look from Mirror Palais’s SS23 collection.

A look from Mirror Palais’s SS23 collection.

One of the inspirations behind the trend on TikTok is the ad campaign for the sustainable womenswear brand Mirror Palais’s Collection III, which was shot in San Miguel de Allende. Campaign muse Daniela Garza, a model with a jewelry company, is lean and tan, with long dark hair and rosaries (that she designs) hanging from her neck. She walks the cobblestoned steps of San Miguel in a beautiful white cotton camisole with crocheted borders and a cream-colored ribbon paired with a fresh white petticoat. She eats with a lavender rebozo across her neck on a rustic wooden table. From where I stand, she lives a romanticized and modern version of Tita’s dream, spending her youth freely in an alternate reality.

In this campaign, I saw Salma Hayek, too, as Carolina in the 1995 film Desperado, on her bed, in her bar, walking the streets of Ciudad Acuña. And as someone with too many white cotton puffed-sleeved Bavarian blouses and a penchant for vintage clothing that transports me, I ate it up. I wanted to tap into my feminine softness and wear something that made me feel like Aphrodite in 80-degree weather. I wanted to feel a certain freedom in my body.

Salma Hayek in Desperado.

True, wearing more sensual cuts makes me feel vulnerable. It not only reminds me of a body I am working to love, but the fear that’s been instilled in me of the violence that comes with the male gaze. But I’m working on embracing this side of me too. I want to escape the confines of Tita and have a taste of life like Gabriela.

Gabriela, played by Sônia Braga (an actress you might recognize who plays Samantha’s love interest in Sex and the City), is the protagonist of a Brazilian film by the same name, (coincidentally also inspired by a novel, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon). Marcelo Gaia, the designer of Mirror Palais, names this character as one of his main inspirations for the collection in a TikTok. Which is funny, because it means the Mexican-girl aesthetic took off thanks to an ad campaign that wasn’t inspired by Tita, Carolina, or Salma, but by Brazilian culture and a Brazilian film, crafted by a Brazilian designer. It reminds me how much Latin American countries share, and how often in the United States we wrongly conflate Latinx with Mexican, instead of learning about the myriad of cultures that exists within them. Though with photos that star a Mexican model, shot in a colonial Mexican city with backdrops that are emblematic of Mexico, the connotation is easy to make.

Sônia Braga in 1983’s Gabriela.

Watching Gabriela, I enter her world. She works as a cook and maid to a bar owner. Gabriela is not a woman of many words, but she expresses herself corporally. She moves like a cat, sexy, always landing on her feet; barefoot and bound to the earth. Her head of brushed-out raven curls falls like ocean waves. She wears bold-colored floral thigh-length dresses that she slips off her shoulders with ease, revealing only bare skin underneath.

Gabriela exudes a certain freedom and radical self-acceptance that is palpable in the way she is clothed. It’s a freedom that Salma Hayek as Carolina projects when she struts down the street in a tied top, an exposed midriff, and a hip-hugging skirt with a slit that opens at her thigh, giving it movement. And it’s a freedom we see in Tita when she’s in the kitchen, kneeled in front of her metate, her eggshell cotton dress sinking off her shoulders as her beloved walks in with a flame burning between them. A freedom that the toxicity of Mexican patriarchy deprived from me as a girl, but that I work to take back as a woman in my body, inch by inch, dress by dress, with clothes that romance my figure, for my own gaze.

Andrea Aliseda is a Mexican-American writer and vegan recipe developer based in Los Angeles, CA. Her published work appears in Whetstone, Bon Appetit, Epicurious, and more. Follow her for updates on Instagram at @andrea__aliseda and Twitter at @alisedaandrea.