The causes for the spread of the quinceañera are numerous and overlapping. 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 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. 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. But what has happened over the last few decades in the United States is the slow absorption of the quinceañera into the general culture. 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. 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. 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. 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. Award-winning novelist Julia Alvarez published her nonfiction cultural study Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA in 2007.
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