Quinceañeras and Womanhood

In the past two weeks, we've been to two quinceañeras, or 15^th birthday parties. These parties, which compete with weddings in their level of importance and extravagance, are the Latino equivalent of the debutant balls that you see in Downton Abbey. They are a very public way for a community to acknowledge a girl's transition to womanhood.

At the quinceañera that we went to for our student Ninoska, there was a moment when Ninoska's aunt publicly presented her with a doll, announcing that it was the last gift she would receive as a girl. And then in the next instant, she handed Ninoska a pair of high heels and told her to put them on. When Ninoska stood up in her new gold high heels, her aunt announced to the crowd of 150-200 people that Ninoska was now a woman.

Putting aside the silly suggestion that high heels are equivalent with womanhood, that moment fascinated me. In a western culture like the US, a girl's transition to womanhood is a long, gradual process; you stop taking baths with your brother, you go through puberty, you do adult things like go to college or get a job. But the whole time, you lack a certainty in the back of your mind about whether you are a girl or a woman. I am 25 and people still sometimes call me a girl. But in that single instant when Ninoska strapped on those high heels, she knew for sure that she had become a woman.

Although I think that the gradual transition to womanhood probably reflects more accurately how it actually happens, there is something really appealing about a symbolic moment of label-changing. As a public celebration of this label-changing, a quinceañera could have the power to hold a community accountable for treating a woman as a woman and not as a girl.

But then, this begs the question: How is a woman treated differently from a girl? Here, the quinceañera is traditionally a patriarchal custom. So rather than urging the community to treat her with the respect that her new status demands, it seems to me that the quinceañera functions instead to put the woman on the dating market. This is why, in the quinceañera ceremony, the father gives his daughter away to her symbolic first dance with a man. The quinceañera is basically a way to let an entire community know that a woman is available for marriage and baby-making.

We saw this exact narrative play out quite literally with one of our students this year. We went to Etni's quinceañera in April. Four months later, she was “robbed,” as they call it here, by her boyfriend and disappeared for over a month. When she finally came back with her boyfriend, she was pregnant. Not long after, her boyfriend abandoned her, leaving her with all of the responsibility of giving birth to and raising a child, at the age of 15.

As I thought about the quinceañeras we've been to recently, I started to wonder why boys don't have them. Why isn't it as important to mark a boy's transition to manhood? Is it because in a way, a boy is always a man? My friend Maria has a 4-year-old son named Hansel, and he already acts like a man, bossing his older sister around and making fun of his older brother when he helps his mom cook. Maybe people assume that boys are born with the control that defines men, whereas girls have to be socialized to behave as women.

Or maybe a boy's transition to manhood is important, but it's just a much less public matter. Maybe it happens when he's helping his father harvest beans and his father chucks him on the shoulder and says, “Now you're a man.” Maybe instead of requiring an entire community to affirm him as a man, a boy only needs his father to give him that label.

I suppose it also comes back to the fact that in this culture, men pursue women, not vice versa. A quinceañera marking a man's entry into the dating pool would seem ludicrous, since traditionally women never make the first move romantically and therefore don't need to know which boys have become eligible young men. Women are like objects on a supermarket shelf, and men do all the choosing.

All that said, I don't think the quinceañera is an inherently sexist tradition. In fact, I quite like the elaborate princess dresses and the religious component and how the whole community comes together to celebrate a specific person and her transitioning life stages. It's not often in a poor community like San Nicolas that people have an excuse to celebrate so luxuriously, with table decorations and fancy dresses and a meal for almost everyone in town. It's a beautiful way for a community to share with each other.

It also has the potential to be a beautiful way to affirm women and to give young women confidence in themselves. If being a woman in this culture meant being strong and independent and deserving of respect, then the celebration that marks this transition into womanhood could be one of the happiest days of a woman's life.