Tita Nurses Roberto

Tita’s nursing of Roberto begins as an improvised response to the loss of his wet nurse and becomes a defining act of care: although unmarried and not his mother, Tita finds herself able to feed him when no one else can. The episode joins a family history in which women’s caregiving is both a source of attachment and a duty imposed by tradition. Tita’s response to Roberto’s immediate need is her own, but it also places her in a maternal role that Rosaura cannot fulfill.

The loss of the wet nurse

Rosaura cannot nurse Roberto, so the family hires a wet nurse from the village. The woman is one of Nacha’s relatives and has recently had her eighth child. For a month she feeds the baby successfully. Then, while traveling to the village to visit her family, she is struck by a stray bullet from a battle between rebels and federales and is fatally wounded. A relative brings the news to the ranch while Tita and Chencha are preparing mole.

Tita completes the dish alone after Chencha leaves to look for another nurse. She returns that evening without finding anyone. Roberto is crying, and the household tries cow’s milk and then tea, following what Nacha had once done for Tita. He rejects both. The wet nurse has left behind a rebozo, and Tita tries putting it on in the hope that its familiar smell will soothe him. Instead, Roberto cries harder: it reminds him that he expects to be fed, while no milk is available. His distress confronts Tita with a need she cannot yet meet by any ordinary means.

Tita begins to nurse Roberto

Unable to bear Roberto’s hunger, Tita offers him her breast, expecting no milk and intending only to comfort him while she decides what else to try. Instead, he feeds, and Tita realizes that milk is coming. The change is inexplicable to her: she is unmarried and has not expected to be able to nurse a child. When she briefly takes him away, he cries again, so she resumes feeding him until he is satisfied and asleep.

Pedro enters the kitchen while Tita is caring for the baby. He accepts what has happened without asking for an explanation, approaches them, and kisses Tita on the forehead. Their moment is interrupted by the sound of Mama Elena’s footsteps. Tita adjusts her blouse and Pedro moves away before Mama Elena enters; she sees nothing that would openly disclose what has just occurred. Even so, she senses that something is troubling the atmosphere. The scene therefore places Tita’s extraordinary care within the household’s restrictions: she can feed Roberto, but she and Pedro must conceal how she does so.

Care, kinship, and secrecy

Rosaura drinks chocolate atole in the hope that her milk will come in, but it never does. Tita, by contrast, has enough milk to feed Roberto and two more babies. Because Rosaura remains weak at times, the family accepts Tita taking over the baby’s feeding, without discovering the means by which she does it. Pedro helps her keep the nursing secret.

The arrangement gives Tita a role in Roberto’s life that exceeds the usual place of an aunt. She feels and acts as though she is his mother, while Rosaura remains his mother in name and is unable to nurse him. At Roberto’s baptism, Tita proudly carries him before the guests. Rosaura, feeling too ill to attend beyond the church, is absent from the banquet, and Tita takes her place there. Nursing thus changes not only who feeds the baby but also how Tita inhabits the family gathering: she is publicly celebrated as his aunt while privately performing an intimate form of maternal care.

Roberto’s presence also brings Tita and Pedro closer rather than driving them apart. His care gives them a shared responsibility, though its hidden circumstances preserve the danger of discovery under Mama Elena’s authority. Tita’s caregiving is not the same as the compulsory service demanded by the De la Garza family tradition, which requires the youngest daughter to care for her mother and denies Tita the freedom to marry. Here, she responds to a hungry child in an emergency; the tenderness of that chosen act stands in contrast to the family’s enforced rules.

Lasting significance

The episode establishes a pattern that recurs in Tita’s later relationship with Esperanza. Under an agreement with Rosaura, Tita is assigned responsibility for feeding Esperanza while Rosaura directs her education. The division recalls Tita’s care of Roberto, but it also makes explicit the maternal work that she had already taken on for her nephew. Her earlier nursing demonstrates how care can create kinship through daily responsibility, even when the family’s formal roles remain unchanged.

Roberto’s nursing episode also reveals the material stakes of that care. The family’s access to food and nursing depends first on a hired caregiver, whose death in the revolutionary violence leaves the baby without a source of milk; the household’s substitutes fail, and Tita’s unexpected lactation becomes decisive. The episode links the political danger outside the ranch to a private crisis inside it, then resolves that crisis through Tita’s capacity to feed the child. Roberto’s hunger is relieved, his bond with Tita deepens, and her place in the family becomes more complicated: she is his aunt in public, but a sustaining maternal presence in practice.