Julia Alvarez - Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA

COMING OF AGE IN THE USA

Viking

VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group

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first published in 2007 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Julia Alvarez, 2007
All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted works: Excerpt from The Worlds Gone Crazy by Jeff Durand and Tommy Barbarella. Used with permission. Excerpt from Querida Companera from Loving in the War Years by Cherrie Morega (South End Press). Copyright 1983 by Cherrie Morega. Used by permission of the author. Excerpts from for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange. Copyright 1975, 1976, 1977 by Ntozake Shange. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. Father and Child (from A Woman Young and Old) from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems (revised), edited by Richard J. finneran. Copyright 1933 by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Alvarez, Julia.
Once upon a quinceaera / Julia Alvarez.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-1340-7
1. Quinceaera (Social custom)United States. 2. Hispanic AmericansSocial life and customs. 3. Hispanic AmericansRites and ceremonies. I. Title.
GT249C.A45 2007395.2'4dc22 2006037561

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btb_ppg_c0_r1

for
all the girls
and for
the wise women
who raise them

Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.

Plato

What is going on?

You are having your quinceaera, or fiesta de quinceaos, or, simply, your quince. And one day when you are as old as your grandmother and you want to say to some young person, hey, I once was young, too, the expression you will use is Yo tambin tuve mis quinces.

I, too, had my quinces.

You will want to claim that magic age in which a Latina girl ritually becomes a woman in a ceremony known as a quinceaera.

What exactly is a quinceaera?

The question might soon be rhetorical in our quickly Latinoizing American culture. Already, there is a quinceaera Barbie; quinceaera packages at Disney World and Las Vegas; an award-winning movie, quinceaera; and for tots, Dora the Explorer has an episode about her cousin Daisys quinceaera.

A quinceaera (the term is used interchangeably for the girl and her party) celebrates a girls passage into womanhood with an elaborate, ritualized fiesta on her fifteenth birthday. (Quince aos, thus quinceaera, pronounced: keen-seah-gneer-ah. ) In the old countries, this was a marker birthday: after she turned fifteen, a girl could attend adult parties; she was allowed to tweeze her eyebrows, use makeup, shave her legs, wear jewelry and heels. In short, she was ready for marriage. (Legal age for marriage in many Caribbean and Latin and Central American countries is, or until recently was, fifteen or younger for females, sixteen or older for males.) Even humble families marked a girls fifteenth birthday as special, perhaps with a cake, certainly with a gathering of family and friends at which the quinceaera could now socialize and dance with young men. Upper-class families, of course, threw more elaborate parties at which girls dressed up in long, formal gowns and danced waltzes with their fathers.

Somewhere along the way these fancier parties became highly ritualized. In one or another of our Latin American countries, the quinceaera was crowned with a tiara; her flat shoes were changed by her father to heels; she was accompanied by a court of fourteen damas escorted by fourteen chambelanes, who represented her first fourteen years; she received a last doll, marking both the end of childhood and her symbolic readiness to bear her own child. And because our countries were at least nominally Catholic, the actual party was often preceded by a Mass or a blessing in church or, at the very least, a priest was invited to give spiritual heft to the fiesta. These celebrations were covered in the newspapers, lavish spreads of photos I remember poring over as a little girl in the Dominican Republic, reassured by this proof that the desire to be a princess did not have to be shed at the beginning of adulthood, but could in fact be played out happily to the tune of hundreds upon thousands of Papis pesos.