Once Upon a Quinceanera

Award-winning novelist Julia Alvarez published her nonfiction cultural study Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA in 2007. Using first hand investigations, interviews with parents and their teen daughters, and some historical context, Alvarez explores the reasons that the quinceañera has become a mainstay of American Latino families with daughters, and the ways in which this formerly rare and upper crust event has become an industry committed to getting people of limited means to overspend.

Historically, in countries south of the United States, elite families would sometimes celebrate a daughter’s 15th birthday by throwing a coming out party that marked the girl’s entrée into marriageable womanhood, marked by things like being finally allowed to wear lipstick and high heels. Because 15 has traditionally been – and often remains – the age of legal consent and legal age of marriage in many Latin American countries, the quinceañera marked the daughter of a wealthy family as available on the marriage market – the same way that debutante balls did in this country. Part of the reason to turn the party into a lavish affair was to lure eligible young men, ostensibly eager not only to find a suitable mate but also to marry into a family of means.

But what has happened over the last few decades in the United States is the slow absorption of the quinceañera into the general culture. Now, American Latina parents throw elaborate and expensive parties for daughters turning 15 or 16 even though the idea that those girls would then immediately go on to get married is long gone. The parties themselves are over-the-top mini-weddings: white puffy princess dresses, a court of best-friend attendants, limousines, caterers, beauticians – all to the tune of many thousands of dollars. Citing a statistic from Quince Girl magazine that Latinos will spend $400 million on these spectacular events, Alvarez states that, quinceañeras are a much “bigger deal stateside than it had ever been back home.” Her book is spent both questioning this newly emerging tradition and trying to identify the reasons for its rise.



The causes for the spread of the quinceañera are numerous and overlapping.

First is the common desire of immigrants who struggled during their own youth to give their children the kinds of lifestyles that they dreamed of and could never have afforded. In her interviews with women of all stripes - mothers who are hosting quinceañeras, seamstresses who sew quinceañera dresses, a chef who bakes enormous quinceañera cakes – a common refrain is that because they themselves had never had a quinceañera, they now feel that it’s their duty to make sure their daughters get one. To them, this event that was never part of their family culture now suddenly feels like a roots-based tradition they need to uphold.

According to Alvarez, this idea of cultural significance stems from the way that disparate Latin American identities based on country of origin have been flattened into one overarching “Latino” identity in the United States. Using the work of historian Eric Hobsbawm, Alvarez argues that the invented tradition of the quinceañera serves to unite and legitimize the newly formed community, La Raza, “by establishing a continuity with a past that may be largely fictitious.”



Second has been the eagerness with which this traditions-based reasoning has been picked up by the party industry in order to grow trends into industry-supporting markets. As one quinceañera businessman tells Alvarez, he markets “retroculturation”: a way of connecting Latino children to a heritage they only know second-hand. The industry is booming, with trade publications and conventions advising professionals on how to get parents to spend money they don’t always have. This leads to conversations like the one Alvarez has with an unemployed man who lives in an over-crowded apartment and is nevertheless spending thousands on a quinceañera for his daughter.

But the true problem for Alvarez is the fact that these parties are potentially harmful to the girls whom they are supposed to celebrate. Rather than viewing the quinceañera as a moment of growing maturity, most of the young teenagers Alvarez interviews see the party as a moment to become a “princess,” and as something owed to them by their hardworking parents rather than a privilege or luxury. Alvarez worries that girls are conflating the responsibilities that should come with maturity and adulthood with the permissiveness and relaxing of rules that is supposed to follow a quinceañera. Anecdotal evidence suggests girls view the party as a license to engage in riskier sexual behavior.

Critics of Alvarez’s book worry that despite her excellent descriptions of the length parents go to provide amazing quinceañeras for their teens, she is nevertheless much too loath to criticize anyone outright. Because of this, the book doesn’t offer conclusions or solutions, but instead ends on a long meditation of Alvarez’s own adolescence, which didn’t feature quinceañeras but did come with a strained relationship with her mother. Still, her struggles as the daughter of political refugees in the 1960s aren’t completely relevant to her chosen subject matter. As Kirkus Reviews puts it in a surprisingly sharp rebuke, Alvarez is “using the topic of quinceañeras primarily as a creaky springboard to launch into windy, maudlin ruminations on growing up as a Dominican immigrant in Queens. With such a narcissistic narrator, it’s no surprise the girls were less than forthcoming.”