Peggy Bulger: Hi everyone. Glad to see you all out tonight. Come on and get a seat everyone. For those of you who don't
know me, I'm Peggy Bulger, Director of the American
Folklife Center, and on behalf of the entire Center
staff I'd like to welcome you to a special presentation of our
Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series. And the Botkin Lecture Series
provides a platform for us to bring in professional folklorists
and ethnographers working both in the academy and in the public
sector to present their findings from ongoing research, and
it's been a wonderful series. We also record these series, as
you can see, for the collections, and this is something that's
kind of a acquisitions project in the making, if you will. We're trying to compliment our
concert series that has been going on for many years, to be
able to have these lectures from scholars available for many
years to come here at the library. Today, I have the honor to introduce
Dr. Norma Cantú, who is a professor of English at the University
of Texas, San Antonio. She's also a fiction writer and a
poet; many of you may not know that. I see a lot of folklorists
in the crowd and, of course, we all know her as a folklorist. She edits the book series,
Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, Borderlands Culture & Tradition
for Texas A & M University Press and she's the author of
the award winning Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood
En La Frontera. She's also Co-Editor of Chicana
Traditions Continuity and Change, and she's currently -- when
she's not here lecturing to us, she's finishing two novels at
once, Cabañuelas and Champú, or Hair Matters, and she's
also preparing an ethnography of the Matachines de la Santa Cruz, a religious dance drama
from Laredo, Texas. And Norma's from Laredo originally. Today, Norma will be discussing
another aspect of her research, namely her work on
coming of age celebrations for young women in
Latina communities. And I know when I was a folklorist
in Florida I first went to Miami and one of my first
field experiences was to attend a Cuban Quinceañera
and I was just blown away; you know, I was stunned for days. But it's very special to have
Norma give this lecture, too, because it gives us
the opportunity -- and many of us are on the Board
of the American Folklife Center, but we want to thank her for eight
years of service on the Board of Trustees of the
American Folklife Center. [ applause ] And, so join me in welcoming Norma
again for giving the lecture. Thank you. [ applause ] Norma Cantú: Thank you, Peggy. Muy buenas tardes. Good evening. It really is a pleasure to be here
and to see so many friends out there in the audience, even an ex-student from Laredo -- from
San Antonio, sorry. It really was an honor
when Peggy asked -- invited me to do the Botkin
lecture, for various reasons. And one is that I remember
when I was a board member when we were discussing
initiating the lecture series and how we felt there was a
need to bring people who were out in the field doing work. I never imagined that the person
being brought in would be me [ laughs ] , so it really is special. And I also want to thank
the staff who helped me with the technical stuff to get
the PowerPoint up right now, but also in the process, Tia and Steve for getting the
flyer out and everything else. Whenever anything happens
at the Library -- and there's five things
going on right now -- it takes a lot of people
to get it up and running, so thanks
to all of you. I'd like to begin by honoring
all of the spirits of this place, this place that is the center,
the heartbeat of our country, where things happen that impact
not just our country but the world. And today is a very momentous day
when such things are happening, so I just wanted to
acknowledge that. [ laughter ] The way I got into folklore
is really fascinating. I come from Laredo, Texas;
it's a border community. We live folklore, as we all do. We didn't call it that. And I went to my very
first folklore meeting of the Texas Folklore Society as an
undergraduate to help a professor who asked if I would help. I didn't know what to expect. It was a shock. It was like the old --
this is in the early '70s; it was like a hootenanny
kind of experience [ laughs ] , but it hooked me. I didn't know people
could study such things. I didn't know you could
make a career out of doing things like that. And so I started collecting
and working in 1975. One of the first publications was
a collection of children's folklore in Laredo that that same
professor kind of pushed me to do. So I've been working in the
field for many, many years but I've never really gotten any
papers that say I'm a folklorist, so I tell people I'm a
non-documented folklorist. [ laughs ] But, as a graduate student my Ph.D.
dissertation was on a folk play, La Pastorella, so I've
always kept that there. And this work that I'm presenting
tonight has been an ongoing project, it gets pushed from the back
burner to the front repeatedly as I'm doing other
things like writing novels and grading papers
and everything else. And it's a work that chronicles or
documents the coming of age rituals, but also other life
marker changes for women. And currently I'm also going to
baby showers and wedding showers and looking at other
ways that women celebrate and mark different
stages of their lives. So today is the Quinceañera
that I'm talking about. I want to define the
term because it's a word that in many communities, non-Chicano communities,
it's not used. They use "Quince Años", "Mis
Quince", or "El Quince". We use "Quinceañera",
and it's a noun. It both refers to the
celebration itself but also to the young woman being honored. And the images are going to be off,
but here's some more key terms. The chambelán is the honoree's
escort, and there he is. And usually the young woman
selects a family member, a cousin or an older brother, or maybe a good
friend, not necessarily a boyfriend. I'm not sure why, except maybe the
parents don't really look favorably on that because it looks too
much like a wedding otherwise. And there's always that taboo; they don't want the
celebration to be like a wedding. The damas are the young women
who accompany the honoree, can be anywhere up to
fourteen, so that you have with the honoree 15, or fewer. And the bottom picture
has I think fewer than 14 because the young woman said
that she didn't want to do that; she only wanted her very close
friends and there were like 12. When I had -- one of the traditional
things that happens is for 15. One of the more recent
transformations of the tradition is
the 50th birthday party for people turning fifty. And when I had my Cincuentañera
I had 49 madrinas. [ laughter ] Actually I had 52 because
two people kept -- three people kept saying they wanted
to be on there so I added them. But it was kind of playing with that
tradition and I wasn't the first, there were other women doing
it, so I just kind of jumped on the bandwagon as a scholar
studying the tradition, and being a participant
in one I wanted to kind of push and see what I could do. The origin is debatable; we have
all kinds of different traditions that we think it comes from, mostly
European: court presentation, cotillions, coming out parties. And the reason it's 15 is in
Mexico during the colonial period, and even up through contemporary
times, the age of 15 is when the young woman was
considered of age to be married. That was a legal age for marriage
and so that's why you use 15. The other, I think, really
important is the indigenous origin, and coming of age rituals exist in almost all cultures
in one way or another. When my students tell me,
"Oh but we don't have that," my non-Hispanic students, I say, "Well you have high
school proms, don't you?" And in a way they are
rituals of coming of age. We also have initiation
rights and there's a Yaki [ spelled phonetically ] ceremony that my friend
Inesta Lamantes [ spelled phonetically ] studies, and it's a
coming of age ceremony that occurs at the onset of menses. So there are rituals that
are kind of combined until -- that one is younger, usually
the young women are 11, 12, or even younger, whenever
it happens. And it's a celebration; it's
a women-only celebration. So, the Quinceañera is not
necessarily a women-only celebration, it includes
men, and in fact one of the most recent transformations,
aside from the Cincuentañera, is that boys are now having
Cincuentañeros as well. The essential elements
of the celebration? I'll begin with the church. There's usually a mass, although
initially, and I traced it back to about the 1930s and '40s
-- we didn't have a mass then; it was only a rosary, again because otherwise it would
be too much like a wedding. And then there's a religious medal. The most recent celebration I
attended, this was of couple of weeks ago, it was not a mass
but it was a Catholic service and the priest came from St.
Edward's University in Austin to San Antonio to a German dance
hall where the celebration was held, and he read the regular liturgy
he would have read at a mass, but he of course adapted it, and
the young woman also read a prayer and you'll see that later. The madrina of the religious
medal -- there's a sponsor. In this case it's my sister,
Maricella, who is the sponsor for my niece, her niece
as well, Clarissa. And the religious medal is
usually La Virgen de Guadalupe, and there's a very special bond that
exists with La Virgen de Guadalupe in Chicano communities,
and it gets translated in this ritual in three ways. One is the medal, another is, usually at the church the
young woman offers some flowers to the Virgen, it's
part of the ceremony, and the third is there's
usually a prayer for the Virgen that the young woman is taught. The celebration itself goes on
also, of course, in the dance hall, or the party, it's
not just religious. And the dance is a
choreographed dance. I wish I had the clip
-- I have some clips -- because they're very elaborate. What I have instead is a cake,
because the cake also occurs or is part of that
celebration at the dance hall. And there's also a ceremony with
shoes and I'll talk more about them in a little while, and a first -- it should be a last
doll not a first doll. The symbolic attire and
accessories: the young woman -- here you see Clarissa, and she's
holding, if you see, a libro and a rosaria, there's
a rosary and a book. She's wearing the diadema,
she's wearing the earrings. She doesn't have the medal yet
because that was the other picture, and she's wearing a nosegay. So, the dress itself -- and I'll
talk more about it in a little bit. The headpiece can be
a tiara or a diadema. Diadema is usually the one with
the flowers; the tiara is the one with all of the encrusted
rhinestones and things. There's usually madrinas, who
are sponsors, for the earrings, the ring, the religious medal,
the libro, rosario, and the shoes. The shoes are changed
from flats to heels at some point during the ceremony,
usually at the dance hall. There are sponsors for all kinds
of things and this is one way that I see the community
establishing that social glue, that bond, between the parents
and the intimate aunts and uncles of the honoree, but also extended
family so that you have a lot of cousins, and even the
whole community, neighbors, coworkers of the parents being
asked to sponsor elements like maybe the engraved cake
server set or the champagne glasses or the Quinceañera doll or the
scepter, invitations, choreography; all of this costs and it costs
a lot, so the more people that can help the better. The religious aspects -- and this
is the one that I attended a couple of weeks ago and I was
telling you the priest came from Austin -- he's
blessing a watch. I had never seen that,
this is a first. Usually it's jewelry, the
religious medal that he blesses. This time it was a watch and
then after he poured the water on it he said, "I hope
it's waterproof" -- [ laughter ] -- and started wiping it. And also the young woman read a
prayer that she had wrote herself, and I had never seen that either
and this is an innovation. Probably -- her father works
with me at the University and he was telling me that she
wasn't sure she wanted one, but in typical fashion of a
15-year-old, she wanted the party, but she didn't really want the mass, and then she didn't want
all 15 damas, 14 damas, she wanted only her close friends. Another interesting aspect is
she didn't invite any of the boys to be partners to the young women
and she didn't have a chambelán, so it was a little
different from the ones -- the more traditional ones. The social aspect includes of
course a catered festive meal, not often catered; sometimes
the family prepares the meal. For my Cincuentañera I had
my extended family bringing in all the food, you know,
tamales, champurrado, all of that. My birthday is in January, so
it was around that time of year. Also, at the reception usually
there's family portraits that are taken with -- in this case, with the grandparents
and the parents. Sometimes it's a whole --
everybody who's in attendance gets in the picture and there's
all kinds of little children. There's no invitation for
a Quinceañera that says, "No children allowed",
because it is a family event. The invitation -- and
I'm sorry this is -- oh, you can see it a little better
than I can up here actually. This looks almost exactly like
my Quinceañera invitation from -- well I won't tell you --
it was a long time ago -- [ laughter ] -- 45 years ago, because it
has the damas and it's got it in Spanish, "Miss Quince Años". There's also the limo, and if you've
seen the movie there's a whole thing made about the young woman
wanting a hummer for her limo. It's very traditional
-- the picture on the -- this one over here is before --
this is when she just arrived. But this one is after she's leaving,
and what they do is all of the damas and everybody gets in there. When they arrive it's usually just
the parents and the young woman, but then all the young people
get in there and they parade through town honking and
shouting and, you know, just coming out the
windows or the sky things -- what are they called on
the car, on the limo? Where do you get the products
and the things you need? Well, at a flea market. In San Antonio you can find almost
anything in the flea market, including -- these are the
cojines up here, these are ramos, there are some diademas, and this
is not part of the Quinceañera. It was just hanging there; it's a
baptismal outfit for a little boy. But you can almost get anything. The cojines, the pillow, is an
important part, and I'm not sure -- this is part of going to the mass. Like for example, Stephanita
who had the party two weeks ago, she didn't have one because
she didn't have a mass so she didn't need a
cojine to kneel at. And often they don't really kneel
because they're too decorated, they have all kinds of beadwork
and stuff, so it's not comfortable. But they almost always
have a madrina de cojine, and it's usually a young girl
who comes in with the cojines. The guest book or photo album
is also elaborately decorated. These are actually pictures
from the Net; you can buy all of this stuff from
various Web sites. If you just Google "Quinceañera"
you get all the Web sites that sell all of this stuff. But you can also -- some
people have them made. The madrina will commission
a seamstress or someone to prepare the guest book
and decorate it with beadwork or with other kinds of embroidery,
and it's usually set at the entrance of the salón with a very fancy pen
with a feather and a quill kind of -- imitation quill kind
of thing, especially -- well I'll talk more about
the theme Quinceañeras. Capias are not traditional
for Chicana Quinceañeras, but they are in Puerto
Rican Quinceañeras, and they usually have
the date and the name. A friend of mine who is Puerto
Rican and had her Cincuentañera -- she had them made for her
Cincuentañera, and like I said, it wasn't part of our tradition, so I had never seen it
except in Puerto Rico. It may also exist in
Central American tradition but I haven't seen
it in the Texas ones. The traditional dress in
Texas is a little different. Ours are white; they almost
look like bridal gowns. The difference, as you can tell, the young woman doesn't have a
veil, she just has the tiara. And there's a ramo,
and they almost look like bridal gowns because
they're white. In Mexico the tradition is light
pastel colors, pink, lavender, light blue, although a couple
of weeks ago when I went to the flea market and I was
talking to one of the women who sells the dresses there, she
was telling me that nowadays a lot of the immigrant women from Mexico who are having Quinceañeras
don't wear the white, they don't wear the pastel. They're asking her for darker
colors, including black, and she was shocked that
they would want black, but she says it's the new tradition;
it's the new fashion if you will. I saw one in Matehuala about
ten years ago that was a print, and I had never seen one. They're all usually solid colors. So that's one of the
main differences, and I don't know exactly how
much freedom the young women have because sometimes it's
the mother that has -- vicariously is experiencing
her Quinceañera because she didn't have one because
they were very poor or something, so now she wants one
for her daughter, and so often the daughter has
to kind of go ahead and agree to what the mother wants. The ramo, or bouquet, is carried
-- or this is a corona, sorry. There's one that's
a ramo and a corona. And Eva Castellanos, who is a
National Heritage Award winner from Oregon, is a master at this and
she handcrafts the corona with -- it looks very similar to
the bridal corona except that she uses wax-dipped
flowers; she dips them in wax to create them, they're handmade. This is a more traditional
eBay or Internet purchase, where they're not as
traditionally made. The corona or diadema -- and this
is a stand at the flea market where you have -- see the -- the
-- well let me show you this one, where the 15 shows, and
that's very typical. And I have a picture -- I
wasn't able to get a good copy; it's from a newspaper -- the
corona is about a foot high, it's like this, and it's all
encrusted, it's got the 15, but I can't imagine how that young
woman wore that, but in the picture in the paper it looked really good. The most common theme, not
surprisingly, is Cinderella, and the carriage is typical. This was a joint -- there
were two Quinceañeras. Some churches are now asking all of
the Quinceañeras from that parish to get together and do it once a
month, so they have one mass a month for all of the birthdays
15-year-olds for that one month. In some cases, one priest told
me he wanted to do it once a year because it's really
taxing on the church to be offering these
Quinceañeras sometimes up to six or eight times a weekend,
starting on Friday afternoon and Friday evening, then
Saturday, then Sunday. So they kind of wanted
to cut on some of that. Going with the theme
of the Cinderella, this is a table centerpiece
and here's another one that could also serve
as a cake topper. Some of these are made in China
and there's a balloon thing. There's even -- at Wal-Mart I bought
a doll Quinceañera made in Taiwan, so this is glass on the bottom. Some of these centerpieces
can get very expensive, but a lot of times
people recycle things. And I don't have a photograph -- I have the actual item
and I didn't bring it -- where they've used plastic
cups and inverted them and that becomes the base, and
then they use wire, you know, just pipe cleaners and things,
to create the centerpieces and they're really beautiful. There's also a toast --
now these are 15-year-olds; they're not supposed
to be drinking, right? So, usually they have apple cider or some non-alcoholic bubbly
stuff that they drink. There's a madrina or a
padrino for the brindis, and that person is
supposed to buy the cups. They sometimes have something like
this, and this is also from -- you can barely see it, but there's
a spot for the bottle behind this and then you have --
there's all of the glasses; do you see them hanging here? There's the stem, there's
the bottom, and it's hanging upside down. And so you have for
all of the court -- the damas and their
chambelánes is called the court. That's why we -- I
and other scholars -- think that it is a European
origin, because many of the words, chambelán, dama -- dama
means lady -- come from -- the vocabulary comes from that
court tradition in Europe. The brindis padrino often
gets up there and toasts. This is my brother-in-law
giving the toast for my niece. And everybody, the chambelánes and
the damas raise their cup and drink. But, again, this was some kind of
fake champagne; it wasn't alcoholic. The cake is another big important
thing and the madrina de cake -- I have been a madrina because
I go to these all the time, people ask me to be madrina. And usually they won't ask me to be
madrina de brindis, for example -- usually that's a couple or a man -- but they'll ask me to
be madrina de cake. That's a very typical one for
a single woman to madrinar. And the cake topper is
a big important thing. How do you select it? It usually matches the dress in
some way and the theme color. I haven't talked about the --
these are two kinds of cakes, one is a very fancy one with
all of the little dolls here and it's got several tiers, and
there's a fancy one up here. The dress here looks
exactly like the one that the young woman was wearing. Well, this is a very plain cake
and you don't have the same. Another unusual thing is that
the damas are wearing brown; it's not a pastel color, and
so that was also unusual. And here's the madrina de
cake standing right here. She was the one who made
the cake in this case. The last doll is also a tradition
that has varied variants all over. In Matehuala I saw -- that same
Quinceañera I was telling you about -- it was a Barbie doll, and
it was a blonde Barbie doll dressed in identical costume as the young
woman, so it was very interesting. Usually, you can -- the people
who create the dolls try to match the dress, but not often. These are things from the
Internet that you can just buy and they have a whole theme, you
can buy the whole line, your dress, the doll, the shoes,
everything to match. It gets very expensive. The idea of the last doll, again, is a marker because the young woman
is leaving her childhood behind and becoming an adult and
so she gets her last doll. The shoes and the scepter. At some point in the ceremony the
young woman will change from flats to shoes that look like this. And most 15-year-olds can't walk
on these heels, but they practice for weeks and months
before; I know I did. And even then I couldn't
walk on them. It takes practice, so
they do, and pretty soon in the dance the shoes are off
and they're dancing barefoot. The scepter is something that is
not often found, but definitely in the Cinderella theme the
young woman will carry a scepter and there will be a madrina that
will be the one who gives her that. At the dance usually she will
dance with her grandfather if the grandfather is still there,
the father, and the chambelán. And if you notice here,
she's dancing in the middle after the father's dance and with
the chambelán, and then there's -- the whole court is all around her. And it's a choreographed dance and
some women have made it a profession to choreograph dances
for Quinceañeras and they earn quite a bit of money. They do it after school
when the kids are away and they can come to the practices. And it is amazing to me
how you can get 14-, 15-, 16-year-olds who usually don't
want to do anything like this come to the practice, because
otherwise they can't participate and rent a tuxedo and show up
and do all this adult stuff. It's amazing. I mean when you see them here
they're all wearing these tuxedos and then you see them the next
day at school and they're all in their baggy pants
and their cholo outfits. The meal itself. They're set up -- this was
the one where, if you notice, there are no young
boys sitting with them. It's just the young women,
so it was a little different from the other one. The products derived from
and for the Quinceañera? Well, music, and it's
another industry that -- there's groups that specialize in providing the music
for the Quinceañeras. Depends on how much money you have; you can get a -- what
do you call it? -- a music machine that does the
music, or you can get a live band to come with mariachis
at midnight, you know, almost like a wedding
with all of that. The Quinceañera herself
often selects music that is appropriate
either for the theme -- And what I'm talking
about when I say theme is that sometimes you have
country/western as a theme and so the dance would
not be the waltz, it would be the Texas two-step or Cotton-Eyed Joe or
something like that. On the other hand, if you have a
Hawaiian theme there could be a hula and -- as much of a hula as a Chicana community
in south Texas could do. [ laughter ] You also could have a theme that
is like moonlight or moonbeams or something, and it's
almost like prom night? You know how proms have themes? It's that same idea and I think
that's where it comes from, that's where the prom
blends into the Quinceañera, so you have these themes occurring
and the music is integral to that. The other thing that happens is
that now you have manuals for how to conduct a Quinceañera. And the Church was desperate because
it is not a religious ceremony, there is no liturgy in the
Catholic church for Quinceañeras or in the Baptist or Methodist
or Unitarian or all of the ones that have now adopted Quinceañeras
for their Latino communities, so they designed their
own liturgy, basically. That priest in Austin told me that
he was just so desperate for it that he just invented it. But there is a manual that tells
you, you know, six months before, rent the hall, or a year before,
get the music, and all of that. Kind of like for brides
when you plan your wedding, that same kind of thing. You also have magazines that have
evolved, Quince Girl is one of them, and now we even have a TV show
that has -- the Sweet Sixteen one? I don't know if you've seen it
on one of the cable networks. There's a sixteen show, but they
cover Quinceañeras, so that was kind of an unusual thing
for me to see as well. And you have children's books. Here's Dora the Explorer with
her cousin's Quinceañera. [ laughter ] It happens a lot, actually. There's a young adult novel, Sweet
15, by Diane Bertrand-Gonzales also. And what happens, and I'm
very happy to see this, is sometimes the parents will buy
the book for all of the court, for the young women who are
the damas, so that they have -- and of course promoting
reading, so I'm all for that. The other thing is sometimes there
will be a poem recited at the event and it's not anything -- it's
kind of unpredictable, it depends. It used to be much more traditional
at weddings and at Quinceañeras for some older person to get up
and recite a poem from memory, a declamación, they
call it, or declamar. That's -- I haven't seen that as
often anymore, partly because some of those older folks have died on and the tradition has
not been passed on. The poems were almost
always in Spanish and a lot of the young people
don't speak Spanish, they're English-speaking
monolinguals in some cases, so there are other things that are
coming in like a magazine or books. There are artists in
Chicano communities that have taken the Quinceañera --
and I apologize for the quality -- I don't think this is
a really good rendition of Carmen Lomas Garza's
painting called "La Quinceañera". And this is outside the church,
everybody's kind of hanging out, and I wish you could see
the detail that she uses. Like in most of her work, there's
all kinds, there's the little kids and then there's older people,
there's all kinds of folks kind of preparing to go inside to
celebrate the Quinceañera. And the other rendition is in a
mural and that's the one that's on the flyer, by the
artist Theresa Powers. And I'm going to go ahead
and just mention the movie, I don't know if any
of you have seen it; I heard from somebody locally
here in DC that it was only here like for a week and
then it was gone. It's a really interesting movie. They got the folklore right
as far as I could tell. There's a place where somebody's
choreographing the dance and they're talking about whose --
but I have some issues with some of the other content of the film
that was problematic for me. It takes place in Echo Park
in California and deals with the gentrification, urban
removal of people and things, so it was really fascinating. If you haven't seen it
you might want to watch it and see what I'm talking about. What kind of conclusions do I draw? Well, it is a life marker ceremony
between childhood and adulthood. Like all life marker ceremonies,
I think it undergoes change as the culture, as the
community needs to change, and it shifts things,
elements in it. But it has a really strong
role in a social group. The shift from girl to
woman, de niña a señorita, is the main purpose of it. And in fact in many communities -- and I've seen this happen
even in my own family -- the young woman becomes a
young woman and not a girl and starts being more responsible
and has more responsibilities. It used to be, when I
did it way back when, that now you could wear lipstick
and you could shave your legs and all kinds of things like
that marked adult women. Now, of course, young women do that
earlier, but there are still things that they perceive are allowable
as you get passed your Quinceañera. The other funny thing is that even
if you don't have a Quinceañera because you turned 15, you might
get a ring as a marker, you know. Your parents can't afford
the full-fledged party but you'll get a piece of
jewelry, the medal, something. Or, if your parents are really
wealthy, you either get a car or a trip to Europe or a party that sometimes they have a
choice of what do you want. In the '70s, '60s, '70s a lot
of young women would choose not to have the party; they
would rather have a car. That's still there, but
I've seen more and more of the young women
still want the party. One of my nieces said no,
she didn't want the party. She wanted the car. So, then my sister found in her
drawer a list of madrinas, damas, and she said hmmm, but she
said she didn't want this, and she was already planning
it, so it's a kind of conundrum. You don't really want it
because it's cursi, it's your -- you know, your parents' thing. But on the other hand
you really do want it. So that happens quite a bit. And I think it is something
that signals for the young girl an appreciation
of who she is to the community, because it really is a
communal celebration. You couldn't have a Quinceañera
with just, you know, five people, or just with your immediate family,
your parents and your siblings. It has to be a community. And it signals that change in status because it also signals a
responsibility to that community; you're no longer alone
in your family, you're a member of
the adult community. And sometimes it also
coincides with confirmation. In many churches confirmation
comes right after, so that also signals another marker. It persists as a social glue, I
think, and as a cultural marker because it fulfills
that need to belong. And especially with people who
have been de-territorialized through immigration, when
they come to Atlantic City -- where I saw a van that said,
"Cakes, Quinceañeras" -- it's because they need
that connection to their home community,
to their home culture. Many immigrant groups -- or
girls go back to their hometown to have their Quinceañera, and
sometimes they'll have two, one for the family
back in Mexico and one for their friends and family here. And, the other thing
that people ask is that why would people spend
all that money to do this? And you have to understand that
the money part is not really the important part. The important thing is the people,
that establishing that community with others, with your compadres,
because then all those madrinas and padrinos become your
compadres and comadres and they are responsible
for that child as well as the baptismal sponsors. [ end of transcript ]
