The Little Princess

Julia Alvarez '71 offers a new take on the coming-of-age story. 

By Elisabeth Crean

The trappings are familiar: the extravagant gown, lavish cake, well-dressed attendants and guests, professional photographer, catered food, spirited dancing, proud parents, ceremonial doll. Wait ... a doll? The tiara-wearing princess at the center of this big day is not a bride, but a birthday girl, a Latina marking her transition from child to woman at age 15.

“Quinceañera” is the term for both the celebration and girl celebrating it. Middlebury writer in residence Julia Alvarez ’71 spent a year traveling around the United States, attending “quinces” from California to Massachusetts and examining the industry that plans and produces the fiestas for the 400,000 American Latinas turning 15 each year. In Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA (Viking, 2007), Alvarez uncovers an intriguing mix of cultural paradoxes.

As Alvarez peels back the layers of the seemingly anachronistic quince tradition, she also meditates on her own difficult coming-of-age as a girl from the Dominican Republic who grew up in New York City during the 1960s; blending reportage and reflection leads her down some unexpected paths. The journey causes her to wonder if seeds of feminist empowerment—so hard won for her—could possibly lie within the “quasi beauty pageant cum mini wedding” of the modern quinceañera.

Alvarez starts out “torn between optimism ... and a sense of dread” for Monica, the Queens, New York, quince whose story she follows throughout the book. This ambivalence mirrors how the author feels about the state of young Latinas in America. She wants to hope, but falls prey to fear when confronting the grim sociological statistics. With more than 40 percent of Hispanic children in the U.S. living below the poverty line, Hispanic girls lead other ethnic groups in rates of teen pregnancy, school dropouts, substance abuse, and suicide attempts. Adolescent health researchers have found, however, that “protective cultural beliefs and practices . . . provide an important buffer against depression and risky behaviors.”

On its surface, the quinceañera seems more like a retro “princess-in-the-patriarchy fantasy” than a cultural practice that could protect a teen from 21st-century dangers. The quince wears a flouncy, floor-length, pink gown and a tiara. She cradles a “last doll,” which symbolizes both a final childhood toy and her readiness to bear children. Preceded by a court of 14 couples (one for each previous year of her life), she enters and sits on a flower-bedecked swing, where her father changes her shoes from flats to heels. Dad takes the first dance and then passes her among male relatives for subsequent turns around the floor. “The quinceañera is like a rehearsal wedding without a groom,” Alvarez admits.

Another similarity to weddings is the wallet-busting budgets, which the author finds particularly painful in light of high rates of Hispanic poverty. Average quinces run $5,000, but $50,000 fiestas are not uncommon. Alvarez hears a Spanish expression—throwing the house out the window—commonly used to describe the extravagance. She wonders if, in some families, potential college money pays instead for a party.

And yet Alvarez ultimately becomes convinced that the quinceañera can play a positive role on a girl’s path to adulthood. The challenge is to continue investing the old tradition with new meaning. American quinces already blend elements from many Latin American cultures. Even their “supersizing”—influenced by everything from Disney movies to MTV’s My Super Sweet Sixteen—shows an immigrant group asserting its success. But Alvarez finds that the quince’s greatest modern strength is surrounding a girl with family at a vulnerable time in her life. She feels this keenly because when she was a young teen, the gap with her parents grew so wide that she left home. Boarding school became her refuge.

Rites have the power to connect self to community.In the quinceañera, Alvarez sees an opportunity for transforming the narrative of Latina girls into an American story. This was a much more painful and extended process for Alvarez and women of her generation. In the turbulent ’60s and ’70s, they had a much greater emotional distance to travel in defining themselves apart from their parents’ native cultures and finding their own place within American society. Alvarez expresses cautious optimism that, with the guidance of “fairy godmothers” who have successfully navigated the tricky journey, young Latinas can be more than pretty princesses for one night. They can become queens of their own lives.

* * *

Isabel Raven’s Los Angeles is teetering on the edge of chaos. Aftershocks from a major earthquake continue to jolt the city. Wildfires sweep through the Hollywood Hills, endangering her parents’ home. A giant tar sinkhole is swallowing up her entire apartment building.

And these are the least of the 27-year-old artist’s problems in Jonathan Selwood’s (’93) wildly satiric debut novel, The Pinball Theory of the Apocalypse (Harper Perennial, 2007). Two supposed allies turn into the horsemen of Isabel’s impending personal apocalypse. The grotesque gallery owner Dahlman, who helped turn her into L.A.’s new “It Girl” painter, now crassly tries to capitalize on her success. Meanwhile, Isabel’s longtime boyfriend Javier betrays her for a shallow, underage faux Christina Aguilera.

Isabel’s “Subbing Celebrities” series of paintings has become hot in Hollywood: a meticulous Mona Lisa, with Leonardo’s leading lady replaced by Cher; Grant Wood’s iconic American Gothic, with the stern farmers’ faces portrayed by Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. A kitschy whim has quickly become her career. Isabel feels transforming masterpieces says “something truly disturbing about the modern world.” Dahlman, however, is all about the hard sell. The crotch-grabbing art dealer, with “the sleazy pansexual look of a failed pornographer,” hounds Isabel to participate in a lucrative endorsement deal for cosmetic gynecological surgery. The ick factor appalls her, but Dahlman eagerly anticipates his cut of a quarter million dollars.

Another sellout is Isabel’s soon-to-be ex-boyfriend, Javier. When they first met, the militant environmentalist from Vermont was a vegan chef. Within six months of landing in L.A., he was “serving up endangered beluga caviar and slabs of medium rare veal.” His latest client, 16-year-old pop singer Mirabel Matamoros, is a caucasian Utah teen who has adopted an aggressively sexy Latina persona to climb the charts. A semi-scandalous tabloid photo clues Isabel in that chef and client have become a little too personal.

The faint ray of hope that finally appears on the smog-laden horizon is Alex, a Dutch-Eskimo billionaire art collector who has fallen for Isabel’s paintings, and possibly for the artist herself. His prodigiously delinquent 13-year-old daughter Cordelia, adopted when a colleague perished in the World Trade Center collapse, takes Isabel on a wild ride—literally. Missed connections and near catastrophes abound. But amid all the harbingers of Armageddon, there’s just a hint that a post-nuclear family might emerge when the dust settles.

Selwood’s fast-paced fable of a life—and a city—on the brink is populated by an astounding array of outlandish characters. Some are quirky; others are modern-day Hollywood circus freaks. Oddities range from modestly appealing (Isabel’s parents use cell phones to communicate inside their large house) to downright repellent (Dahlman’s vast repertoire of misogynistic behavior and language). The author has conjured a world full of uproariously amusing people, however, whether you’re laughing sympathetically with them or in horror at them. Best to park the plausibility meter and go along for the rollercoaster read.

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