Like Water for Chocolate

why mama Elena was strict parent?

why mama Elena was a strict parent

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The tyrannical, widowed matriarch of the De La Garza clan, Mama Elena is the prime source of Tita's suffering. Her fierce temperament inspires fear in all three of her daughters. She keeps Tita from her true love, Pedro, and it is later revealed that Mama Elena herself once suffered from a lost love, embittering her for the rest of her life.

Source(s)

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/likewater/characters.html

She was dominant force period, not just as a parent;

The ranch is the domain of Mama Elena. She is the dictator. She makes the rules.

She rules by the force of her own personality: personalismo.

When her fiat is not enough she resorts to "respectability" and "tradition."

We are never sure whether the "tradition" is real or one of her own invention.

She has risked respectability (her affair, from which came Gertrudis) and flagrantly violates the traditions she doesn’t like: e.g., she is a woman running a ranch in an otherwise patriarchal society.

The rules apply to everyone else, not to her.

The other characters, although they have personalities, all symbolize roles played by subjects of a dictatorship.

Source(s)

http://academic.regis.edu/jroth/CCS400.LikeWaterNotes.htm