Ep 47: The Quinceañera Evolution and Modern Latinx Identities with Rachel V. González-Martin

Did you know there are over 400,000 Quinceañera’s celebrated annually in the United States alone? In episode 47, Rachel V. González-Martin joins us to shed light on the evolution of Quinceañera over time and their connections to modern Latinx cultural values. Dr. Rachel Valentina González-Martin is an assistant professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the coeditor of Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture and Author of Quinceañera Style: Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities. We chat about the societal impacts of Quinceañeras, with a focus on community building, family dynamics, and youth empowerment among Latina girls in the US. We also explore the historical origins of Quinceañeras and how it is a blend of European court customs with indigenous roots and modern influences like social media. This is a fascinating conversation that you do not want to miss!

Buy her book here:
Quinceañera Style: Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities

Timestamps: 

• 03:08: Sharing personal experiences at a Quinceañera celebration.
• 04:55: Personal stories of Quinceañera experiences.
• 10:34: Marketing and dress transformation in Quinceañera celebrations.
• 13:38: Customization of Quinceañera events.
• 22:48: Contrasting planning needs across different generations and traditions.
• 23:40: Evolution of Quinceañera practices and cultural significance.
• 32:36: Significance of visual narratives and cultural transformations.
• 39:20: Creating a legacy through Quinceañera rituals for future generations.
• 49:30: Exploring historical arcs and personal stories in Quinceañera rituals.
• 59:29 Quinceañera and the church
• 01:05:01 The Church is in competition with popular culture
• 01:05:49 Male version of a Quinceañera

• •Focus on consumerism in Quinceanera celebration
• Impact of normalizing luxury in society
• 👗 **Traditional Quinceanera Dresses**
• Significance of dress customization
• Marketing strategies for quinceanera events
• Cultural symbolism of quinceanera attire
• 💬 **Communication and Storytelling**
• Sharing personal stories to connect with others
• Role of dress as a symbol in storytelling
• Importance of expressing personal preferences
• 🎉 **Celebration Planning**
• Community involvement in event planning
• Social curation of quinceanera events
• Emphasis on customization and individual preferences
• 🎂 **Symbolism of Cake in Folklore**
• Cake as a communication tool in cultural ceremonies
• Understanding the role of food in traditional events
• 📝 **Overall Message of the Book**
• Encouraging individuals to express their preferences
• Empowering girls to communicate their needs and desires

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00:10
Vanessa
Welcome, welcome, folksy folks. Welcome to Fabric of Folklore podcast. I’m your hostess, Vanessa Y. Rogers, and this is the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of folklore. This podcast is about exploring our past, our present, and our future. Folklore is culture. It’s identity. It’s the expression of who we are as a people. Our folk tales, mythologies, rituals and traditions all help to paint the picture of what we hold dear and what we value as a group. Beauty and the beast, for instance, is a fairy tale that most people are familiar with, but it was actually based off of a true person, someone who suffered from a genetic condition that caused excessive hair growth. 

 00:48
Vanessa
And there were lots of different messages imparted in the fairy tale itself, one of which is that beauty is within, not just without, but another was a reflection on society at large’s difficulty accepting people who look different than what we expect. And on fabric of folklore, we want to ask these deeper questions, these deeper level questions, and in doing so, we have a better understanding of our changing values and those of our cultures and other cultures. When we explore these underlying messages, we build understanding and empathy, which turns us into a better human being. 

 01:25
Vanessa
So if that is a podcast that you want to continue to listen to, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you get our notification every week when our podcast drops, whether that’s on YouTube, if you’re watching, or if you’re listening on your favorite podcasting platform like Spotify or Apple, make sure you’re subscribing. And if you’re a long time listener, consider giving us a review that’s so helpful so that other new listeners can find us. And we have a fantastic, fun show today, one that I’m really excited about because it’s the first guest who teaches at my alma mater at University of Texas at Austin. Doctor Rachel Valentina Gonzalez is an assistant professor of Mexican american and Latina Latino studies at the University of Austin at Texas. At University of Texas at Austin. 

 02:11
Vanessa
She is the co editor of Race and Cultural Practice in popular culture and author of Quinceaneta style, Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer identities. It was the winner of two awards in 2020 the Emily Toth best book in women’s studies and the popular culture, and the Eli Kangas Miranda Prize in Women’s studies in folklore. We’re going to be talking about her book today, which is a dynamic study of social negotiation and consumerism in the coming of age Quinceanera celebration and the impact of normalizing spectacles of luxury. So thanks so much, Rachel, for joining us today. 

 02:55
Rachel 
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. And in case anyone’s wondering, I love consumerism. So this is not a negative, but it’s just thinking about the cultural phenomenon of buying. 

 03:08
Vanessa
Great footnote. So in the beginning of your book, you tell us really beautiful story of one of your first experiences with the quinceanera when you were a little girl at your God sister’s Quinceanera celebration. Can you tell us a little bit about that story? 

 03:26
Rachel 
Yeah. So one of the big things with writing about quinceaneras and talking to people, planning quinceaneras about quinceaneras, was that I was consistently being asked into their story by sharing my story. And sort of on repeat, I realized, well, I never had a quinceanera. Quinceanera was not something that my parents were interested in hosting. It was. Was very antithetical in many ways, the consumerism of it, but also the sort of feminine spectacle. My father wasn’t interested in me being a public female in any kind of way. I grew up in the nineties in the San Francisco Bay Area in Oakland. And so there was just a lot of. A lot of conservative thoughts about being safe, being inside, definitely not sort of being out there. 

 04:16
Rachel 
So my God sister Amelia, who’s lovely, who’s spent most of her life on the east coast, but was back and forth to the Bay Area where her mom lived. She had her quince, Nina, at 16. So she was having a quince in this hybrid way, which was, you know, half of her friends were mostly, you know, American, so they understood 16 as a special number. And then her family, her mother is puerto rican, and so this mix of the quince and the 15th, and so she had a big old kinse, but for her 16th birthday, and growing up, that was really the only quince I ever participated in. So when I was interviewing young women, there was a lot of me understanding my story in reference to how they were telling their story, if only because they were asking me questions. 

 05:06
Rachel 
So my sort of closest memory to being in the quinceanera was being a little girl and repurposing my first communion dress, which I remember very distinctly. And I remember Amelia’s dress like, that was the biggest thing that I remember because it was beautiful. It was. It was big, and it was satin. And you mentioned meeting the beast. That’s like my favorite Disney. That’s my favorite story. But her dress, Amelia’s dress was sort of that sweetheart cut, and it had the. It was off the shoulder. It looked a lot like the cut of Belle’s gold dress in the film. In the cartoon, you know, the Disney movie. And so I just remember that very distinctly, this idea that she wasn’t in pink, she was in peach. And I just thought it was so pretty. So I remember very distinctly those colors and that experience. 

 05:59
Rachel 
And then I remember later, growing up in. In our house, where my mother, they had a. In Spanish, it’s called a vitrina. But, like a curio cabinet, like, where they kept things, nice things that you only use seasonally. And there was always a little plastic high heel that was filled with a little gauzy bag that had. I believe it was potpourri in it that had a little peach colored ribbon. And that ribbon is called a capia. And the capia has, like, a stamped name and date on it. So it said Emilias quinceanera in little gold writing one side of the ribbon. On the other side it had the date. And so I never really realized till later that the keepsake, this memory object. Right. I always remember it being there and having it. And sometimes I even forgot the event. 

 06:57
Rachel 
Like, oh, yeah, we had that. That was something we participated in. And so when I was working on this project and developing. Trying to understand how young women were communicating about the tradition itself, it really put me in a place to have to remember my own connections and even remind myself that you do have connections. It’s just they aren’t the same as others. But you remember. You remember these moments. And so that was a really interesting sort of like a memory experience for me to go back and be thinking about, oh, yeah, I have my quinsen memory in my own way. It doesn’t match other people’s. I don’t have, you know, I turned 15, and this magic happened, or the dress happened or tragedy happened, whatever the. You know, whatever theme was. But I did have this memory of standing with my. 

 07:50
Rachel 
My God sister and being part of it. And even remembering how. How being included in it was so meaningful, even though I was terrified as a very shy child. So the idea of having to walk, you know, walk up an aisle kind of by myself, right, as a. With people looking at me, even if it wasn’t my event, that was pretty. That spotlight enough. I remember, like, I don’t want to do it. Please don’t make me do it. But even now, in retrospect, thinking how important it was that both of my brother and I were there really reinforces, you know, these community family dynamics that, you know, in many ways, like, oh, if I had understood that then. The way I understand it now, I feel like I would probably still be close to Amelia, right. 

 08:34
Rachel 
But since our lives has been split, so that’s a little bit of a story. 

 08:39
Vanessa
Were you sad when you didn’t have your own quinceanera, or did you have a sweet 16 or did you just not. 

 08:45
Rachel 
I was definitely so I was definitely a more quiet, nervous teenager. I did not have a keen fit. I did not want to have a keen fit. Like, I was definitely not. That wasn’t sort of my style in general, 15 or 16. My family wasn’t also very. I grew up in a traditional mexican american household. There wasn’t a lot of, like, going to friend’s house, doing a lot of things. You mostly stayed with your family. You stayed home. So there wasn’t, to me, it just was not. It wasn’t an appealing option, but it also wasn’t really an option. So it wasn’t necessarily something that was cultivated in my house. 

 09:23
Rachel 
But I had friends who were having quintess, and it was a bit, you heard people planning or talking about it, but people that I was friendly with, but not necessarily people that, like, I wasn’t going to be part of their celebration. The school I went to, the high school I went to catholic school, into private school. And actually, demographically, Latinos were a pretty small number. So it wasn’t necessarily like I had a ton of latino friends. Actually mostly grew. My friends were mostly asian american. So sort of a different kind of cultural community. Even though you can check boxes for like, oh, I’m mexican american, or, you know, this is where I’m from. I didn’t necessarily grow up with that being so close to my, particularly my adolescent years that it was even something that crossed my mind. Yeah. 

 10:10
Vanessa
And you mentioned the big dresses, and they are. They’re larger than life. They, I mean, they take center stage. It’s not even, you know, the equivalent of a wedding dress. 

 10:21
Rachel 
It’s. They’re big. No, not at all. And even now, it’s like we think about, like, the biggest dresses or the most spectacular styles and things. You know, marketing is huge, you know, especially targeted segment in marketing. Right. So the latino quinceanera industry is booming and growing and has been for decades before. So my dissertation before the book, really was about the dresses and the transformation of dress and dress style. And some of it is really basic. Right. The idea that as dress shapes and styles leave, let’s say, home dressmakers or community dressmakers and just become part of a more general consumer, public, they’re getting influenced by other forms of fashion, other forms of culture, and they’re also just growing in size and spectacularity, because all of a sudden, you have this kind of competition for, like, what do you want? 

 11:22
Rachel 
And then people sort of one up. Well, if I want it this big, you’ll have it this big. Or even with the idea of color variability. So I spent a lot of time thinking about, like, what did they used to look like? What do they look like now? Knowing that there’s a lot of flux and flow. But it was really that quinces, when people, quote unquote, people within latino communities think of, like, a traditional quinceanera dress, they’re really picturing something that is, I was gonna say demure, but something that is white or pink, something that is very much more of what’s understood to be sort of a classy senorita, like a good young girl, right, who is probably, we’re thinking, in line with sort of the issue of virginity, someone being tied to sort of a good family, a religious community. 

 12:10
Rachel 
That’s the culture that has been built up around it. So you often had young women, more modest dresses or dresses that were full length that had, you know, a coverage of the shoulders or decollete. Again, we’re thinking about a very particular kind of modesty, right? And that modesty also translated into color, right? So, you know, if you were a young girl, you wore pink or white, you weren’t wearing black or red, and that was something that was maintained by families, right? Oh, your mother was going to help your grandmother make your dress or your aunt. But as people, as communities, latino communities in the US were, you know, growing and moving. So if you didn’t in somewhere like San Antonio or you didn’t live in LA, right? 

 12:52
Rachel 
The idea that all of a sudden, if your family moves, you know, you don’t have those same traditional models around you, and you also don’t have the same traditional labor force. So if your aunt made everybody skince and your family moved to Milwaukee, you’re going to have to find someone else. And then you’re sort of translating. Well, what do you want? Well, what do you have? And some of the early skince addresses were really coming from Cuban Americans or new Cuban Americans, cuban exiles who were in south Florida and who wanted to continue gint traditions, but their resources locally were wedding shops. And so what you had were sort of these elaborate wedding dresses that were being modified, right? You had trains being cut off, you had nails being removed. Maybe you added gloves. Right. 

 13:38
Rachel 
There was something about this that was like, okay, we’ll just transplant it. But as these sort of traditions grew. And so for me, what’s really interesting is thinking about the dress changing is really thinking about cultural values shifting. Maybe not solidifying in any one way, but people sort of testing things out. So as we see sort of the kinsa leaving, let’s say it isn’t just the church community and a family community and cousins and extended family. Now you’re talking about all my school friends and, like, all the people that my dad knows, or whether that’s, you know, culturally, like, you know, co occurring cultural communities or mixed communities, right? All of a sudden, there’s just new influences. And so as the dresses entered a larger marketplace, right. All of a sudden, okay, white is nice, pink is nice. 

 14:27
Rachel 
But now people are saying, well, my favorite color is blue, or my favorite color is yellow, or, I don’t want to look like my sister. All these other factors have said, okay, now that we’re dealing with a marketplace that isn’t just like, well, your grandmother’s gonna gift you something, and that’s what you get. It’s, we’re gonna go to a shop, and we’re gonna start looking at what’s at this shop, right? And then you have a mix of, well, these are the wedding collections, but they can be modified, or these are the prom dresses, but they can be modified. And what you get is a very distinct understanding that, no, a quince address is specifically looks a certain way. And as people start to put an emphasis on, like, well, it’s especially in the late nineties, early two thousands. Like, this is my youthful experience. 

 15:11
Rachel 
And so, like the post 2000 census, where Latinos were seen as the fastest growing minority, that also meant they were consumer demographics. And now we have a consumer demographic that’s ethnicized or racialized, but it’s also mixed with the idea of, like, youth cultural demographics, right. MTV, Nickelodeon, all these sorts of other booms around age specific marketing for kids and adolescents, right? Kind of fits in with, okay, latina girls playing a quince that don’t want to go to a quote, unquote Latina bridal expo. And I was talking to one of these organizers, one point, like, I used to run bridal expos, and what you get were a lot of latino families who hadn’t celebrated before looking for dresses for quinceaneras. And he’s like, the draw was so heavy. He’s like, well, we might as well just have expos? Just for quinceaneras. 

 16:01
Rachel 
And that was about the early two thousands. And it’s only grown since then. Right. And so you get this specialized niche market and then now you have competition. Right. So that means it’s not just one style of dress, it’s a hundred style dresses or it’s not just like, oh, we can show you what Mary’s bridal has in a junior petite line. It’s no. Now we’re going to look at the very specific quinceanera branded dresses that are saying, this isn’t a wedding dress, this isn’t a prom dress. We can, we can customize this for your event. And there was something about being seen. So that consumer experience really sort of grew and had a life of its own. It has a life of its own in terms of style, shape, color, and very much in terms of the number of dresses. Right. 

 16:50
Rachel 
Like any sort of luxury item, it isn’t like you have one dress, you have three, you have costume changes. And so all that’s not required. Yeah. It’s not just like you do it once, like, and again, depending on the size, depending on tax brackets. Right. All of that changes. So now you have this variability on a variety of levels. But I can absolutely tell you can go into a shop or you can look in a catalog and without having, like, the branding names, I feel like I can say what makes a quince address versus a prom dress versus a wedding dress. And it’s very distinct. And maybe that’s because I’ve never seen a three piece convertible purple and silver zebra print wedding dress. That doesn’t mean it’s not coming, but that’s, it’s a very specific kind of niche style for keeping. 

 17:34
Vanessa
Well, maybe you can paint that for us. Like, how is a kinsa dress for those people who haven’t seen one and don’t know, like, what that looks like, how was it different than a prom dress versus a wedding dress? 

 17:46
Rachel 
Yes. So a classic, let’s say, what’s seen as sort of the classic shape for king said dress as a ball gown. Right. So that large a line skirt that’s very full with a crinoline or some other kind of 3d bolstering underneath. There’s all sorts of different kinds of traditional crinolines with, like a hoop skirt or sometimes it’s just a pull on slip that’s got tulle in it. In Mexico, I came across these really interesting, biodegradable, I think, sort of single use paper crinoline. That, again, was a lot cheaper. But you weren’t going to. You’re only going to use it once. So again, depending on your tax bracket, there are ways in which you can create, in this case, create volume. 

 18:28
Rachel 
So a traditional dress, really models like 17th century spanish and french court dresses, which is tight, corseted, which sort of accentuates the bust off the shoulder in some way open. And then with this very large skirting. Right. And for quinces. Right. This idea of full length gown sort of symbolized formality, but it was also because it was being coupled with a kind of traditional waltz. So young women, as part of the tradition, right. You appear in church, and then you have a celebration. It’s really a dinner dance. Right. And so in this dinner dance scenario, young women are presented publicly, and part of that public presentation is a couples or a group dance with their court of honor, who aren’t dressed the same, but are dressed to sort of accentuate the birthday girl. So traditional quince addresses, again, tend to be long. 

 19:31
Rachel 
They tend to be a little bit more modest. So in terms of modesty, you still might be off the shoulder, but their chest is covered for the most part. Or they have a high neck, or they have some kind of bolero jacket or a scarf, something where they’re covering up a little. And over the course of an evening, a young woman might remove some of these extra bits. More and more, you can find. So the ball gown is the most, like, traditional in style. Right. A cinched waist, a wide petticoat, and really, this reminiscent of european court culture, sort of classic princess style. 

 20:08
Vanessa
Right. 

 20:09
Rachel 
Classic princess style ball gown. More and more, as young women are saying, I don’t look good in that, or I don’t like that. You can find different variations, but sort of the most popular dresses I saw were some variation of a ball gown that in the early two thousands and mid two thousands, the regular ball gown became something that you could take apart. So it was ball gown that was. Had removable pieces. So your ball gown, although you come in and process in sort of this grand form, if you’re gonna dance with your friends all night, there’s a mini skirt underneath that you take off and sort of literally convert, which I thought was really fun. Yeah, a lot of sort of these. So there was that kind of, like, the dress changes shape, but it’s roughly the same. 

 20:56
Rachel 
But so the idea that something like colors and textures and applique becomes really important. So, you know, what makes it your dress? And so I worked with a small dress shop in San Jose, California, which is where I was doing much of my dissertation field work. And they were very much like, we are not your chain bridal store. We are not Mary’s bridal. And you’re like, cool. Okay, what does that mean? Well, that means, you know, our dresses really start at about $600. And with that, you. You can customize. Right? So you go from a plain bodice and a plain skirt in a solid color, and then you add. Right. And so at any different level. So they would talk to me like, oh, you know, this was around the time. 

 21:36
Rachel 
This is the early two thousands, around the time when the Disney Quinceanetta dress lines just started coming out. So you can get a Cinderella inspired quinceanetta style dress. Right. You can get a Mulan inspired. You know, you can see all these things. Yeah. And so this bridal shop was one of the earliest to be like, oh, we can give your, you know, Belle themed quinceanera, beauty and the beast. Sort of like, off branded, but exactly how you’d want it, right? What would you want it to look like? And so their big push sticking point was customization. So that became a huge focus. Like, how do you make this your own? And this was important because the girls that I was speaking with in the families who were planning, that was really the drive. How do I find my dress? 

 22:22
Rachel 
How do I plan my event? Not how is this a communication with other generations or other local communities? It became very personalized, and I feel like that’s one of the biggest distinctions over the generations. And I feel like it’s some of the most. Like, when you talk to different generations of folks, particularly in places like Texas, where you don’t really need planners and people to be intervening. Not like in other places where the generations don’t go as deep either in their locality or in the tradition itself, where you have people saying, I need a planner or I need to go somewhere. I need someone to tell me what to do for this event. And so then you have this narrative of the particular moment that sort of characterizes what their daughter or their niece or even their son might end up doing. 

 23:08
Rachel 
But so this idea of, you know, this customization, what the dresses look like. They’re princess dresses. They really are. But they also. So you sometimes you could see, like, oh, I could see that as a wedding dress if it was in white or in ivory, but, like, in hot pink with, like, you know, with a pair of bedazzled sneakers. It’s not a wedding gown. Right. You can see it right away on the body. It’s not a wedding gown. Even though you could see. Okay, I see where you would start, like, coming with this and with prom dresses. And I was really interested. I would. I would interview a lot of young women at home. They’d invite me to their kitchens and set out pictures and show me sort of their. Their. I thought it was great. 

 23:46
Rachel 
You know, a lot of people told stories through the images, which is, I realized that was really important for people. So the dress became this larger symbol of the event itself and the way that they talk through it. But they would also ended up, if they were, you know, in their early twenties, usually would show me pictures of their prom dresses and things like that. And I was like, oh, you know, you could see right away there was a difference, and part of it was a volume. Like, you know, maybe that’s just the style and era, but for the most part, the silhouettes were not so full. Right. There was an extra crinoline. In fact, most of them were fairly sleek, fairly narrow, hugging of the body. And they would say things like, oh, I wouldn’t wear this to Mike Einstein. 

 24:27
Rachel 
Like, it almost like it didn’t have enough coverage. Even if you’re being cinched in by a corset, you still have layers and layers of fabric. There’s something about it that. That’s not normal for a prom, but it’s absolutely part of the kinset to have this sort of physical presence where you’re also not being expected to move around so freely. Right. You’re sort of maintaining a kind of, we’d say, regal posturing. Right. You literally can’t run. So far, it was a little bit different, sort of. With the characterizations of kind of being with your high school friends at prom. It was a very feeling. Right. Or the idea that you’re needing to fit, literally fit into space with other people. The quinta dress is really about standing out. Right. 

 25:12
Rachel 
And it’s also, I would tell people, it’s so interesting because you think about the size of the dresses. Right. You think about the circumference and, like, the diameter of, like, a dress. It’s a good five and a half feet. Right. So it’s talking about sometimes very small bodies taking quite a bit of space. And I found that really fascinating, that the dress, the evolution of the dresses are all about girls actively wanting to or sort of embodying taking up more space. Interesting. Yeah. 

 25:43
Vanessa
Yeah, absolutely. So tell us about the journey of how you wrote this book. You said it did. It started as a dissertation. 

 25:51
Rachel 
Yes. So this book started as a dissertation. Excuse me. I’m sorry. I hope that doesn’t interrupt. Yes. This book started as my dissertation, and then it took about. So I started doing fieldwork for the quince in 2009. So it was a good ten years after that it finally was published, but it had a variety of iterations. And originally, when I was working on this for my dissertation, so I went to Indiana University and got my PhD in folklore, and I studied under Praveena Shukla, who was a body art scholar, and she worked on the sort of elaborate layers of indian wedding. Indian wedding dress. And so I learned a lot about dress in the body from a ritual kind of perspective. But what was really missing for me, and something that wasn’t a. 

 26:43
Rachel 
Wasn’t really part of my work in terms of my training, was sort of this understanding of intersectionality or thinking about race and class and gender being performed through dress in a very explicit way. And so I did. I did. I did a lot of collecting. I I decided that at first I thought, oh, I’ll work in a quincenil dress shop and just watch people shop, like, you know, be around. And that was, you know, I didn’t end up doing that because I ended up living somewhere else. But I noticed the places where I was living in the Bay area, which is where I’m from, there were quince shops everywhere, and I thought that was hilarious to where somebody in my mind, like, have they always been here? Did I miss this? 

 27:26
Rachel 
You know, and something about this sort of being in all these places, like, it was somehow like, the rent here is not cheap like, this. This is an expensive place to have a business. Do you really have that much business? And they did. Right? And so this means, like, there’s something here I’m missing from this business angle. And so I started following Keith Expos. I found one because I was following a small business saying, oh, you want to see what dresses we produce? Oh, well, I have a show. I was like, you have a show? Like, oh, we’re going to be at an expo, and we’re going to be featuring our dresses. And I was like, I have no idea what that means, but thank you. 

 28:01
Rachel 
I took, you know, information, and I showed up, and I realized, you know, there were, especially in the early two thousands, only a handful of companies around the nation that were the planners and providers of quinceanera expositions. And the one that I ended up working with was quinceanerasmagazine.com. And they were a national franchise company that had these different sort of outposts. They’re out of Las Vegas, but they were all over the west coast, in the midwest. In maybe the last ten years, they’ve gotten to the east coast, Washington, DC. But the idea is they host quintet expos in these different places, and they kind of cater to the different communities. So I spent a few years following them around the southwest, particularly all up and down the California coast, and getting a sense for what they were doing from a business angle. 

 29:02
Rachel 
But also really, I found them to be these really interesting indicators of some sort of cultural practice, as in, if there’s going to be a. There’s. There’s a Quinceanera expo happening in what was then called, like, the Central coast in California, like it was away from the big cities, you’re like, there has to be. They’re identifying and saying, we’re not going to do this unless we think there is a market for this here. So part of it was, oh, as I follow these expos to, like, Iowa and Nebraska and these other, these places, I was like, huh, they have enough of a population to make one of these expos worthwhile to get vendors. And they did. And so I basically started saying, like, okay, the quinceanera industry is sort of marking where they’re growing or established latino communities. Who and vendors. 

 29:57
Rachel 
So it was this combination of where Latinos are and how tradition, following traditions can sort of indicate, like saying, you know, you’re in the right neighborhood with a certain kind of, like, or restaurant, right food culture. Oh, I know where I am. And I found that quinceanera shops were part of that narrative. And to me, that was so important, because when I think about latino communities, I really do think heavily about patriarchy and masculinity or masculine kind of domination. So the idea that a young woman’s tradition could be such an important part of, let’s say, a neighborhood economy or regional economy, I thought was fascinating. 

 30:38
Rachel 
And so the political economy event, thinking about the dress as it’s, you know, whether it’s mass produced in China and brought in, you know, through Houston and then distributed to some sort of chain, or whether people are selling, I found it really interesting because I found companies that were, you know, exclusive in the US, but they were importing directly from Mexico or from Latin America, and that became like a really hot commodity. Cause all of a sudden you could say if you’re a third generation mexican American, that your dress came from Mexico. And somehow that was about the story that you wanted to tell about yourself or your family wanted to tell about them. 

 31:17
Rachel 
So that became super important to me, was sort of following the fabric, following the price tags, and only seeing, even under COVID, only seeing the tradition and the business sector grow. And I thought that was fascinating. Right. This idea of whether it would everything going more and more into growth, into kind of specificity, into sort of the obscurity of, like, oh, you know, this is a home based tradition. This is something that, you know, our family does quietly, maybe with our church, to, you know, go online and check out the Disney Quinceanetta packages. They start around $7,000 and go up from there just to have your quince at Disneyland. And again, with the demographics of Southern California or Florida. Right. They’re full. Right. It’s realized. 

 32:04
Rachel 
And so for me, that became really powerful to think about entering a cultural community through a traditional practice and kind of get a sense for not just how communities see that tradition and see their life and history and stories, but then realize how much outsiders are saying, hey, this is something we should pay attention to. And so this growth of a consumer demographic of Latinos, again being marketed towards specifically for, like, cultural practices became really powerful to me, became really significant. 

 32:36
Vanessa
Yeah. So you talked about the price tag. So what, how. What does that range look like? 

 32:43
Rachel 
So this, again, hugely varies in the mid two thousands, early two thousand ten s, a Princess Quinceane princess, quote unquote Princess Quince was about $30,000. Right. And so that’s this family budget. But you can have, again, that’s saying, that’s. That’s probably including, you know, multiple dresses and, like, a venue for 200 people. Right. And people all being kind of black tie and people being fed. And people being fed. Right. People being fed. And so part of this is it used to be, right, a young woman would have a court of honor. So of some number of friends or cousins, usually family. Right. They would invite, and everyone would learn this waltz together. 

 33:25
Rachel 
One of the most interesting things I found was in the early two thousands and the early two thousand and ten s, one of the things that was picking up was all the audio visual marketing that was so people getting videographers and professional everything to document their kinks. But at the same time, that also meant people like, well, we’re going to invest in a videographer that this dance better be good. So that meant hiring not, like, your friend or your niece to do the choreography, but someone professional. And that escalated to these, like, dance studios who said, well, we actually have six men, young men who are dancers with us that we’ll rent as part of your event. And so you see this sort of transformation. 

 34:11
Rachel 
Part of the cost, I think, is also connected to the fact of how far photos and video would go. Right. The idea this is going to be online. We are going to post this on YouTube now. It’s going to be on TikTok or it’s going to be out there. So let’s not embarrass ourselves. And our family opened up a whole new budget part. Yeah, we never paid their cousins. Right. Everyone bought their own dress and they didn’t have. That was the gift, was that they were part of it. But now you have these professional interventions that are really upping the price tag. Right. So it’s a different sort of game in terms of where you’re like, what kind of ginsa do you want? Do you want something themed? Do you want something at a particular location? And that, I think, was really interesting. Right. 

 34:54
Rachel 
Who could afford to have, you know, this is actually most popular when I was, I remember very distinctly a dance company that was, I was in San Diego at an expo, and these folks were young men from Tijuana, from right across the border, who were sort of like, oh, yeah, you know, we work with this group and, you know, we can learn any dance. And they were probably between the ages of 16 and 21. And the whole idea, they looked young. You couldn’t. I couldn’t tell, you know, put them in the colorful suits and they all know their dance steps. So that kind of tradition of having these sort of professional dancers, again, connecting it to social media, like what you want to see, but it also meant you had a lot more people who were not choosing to have these courts of honor. 

 35:42
Rachel 
The court of honor was very symbolic in terms of, like, the young girls years. Like, it was traditionally, sometimes it was seven, sometimes it was 14. But it all kind of revolved around the girl and her escort being like the 15th person or couple. And all of a sudden that was kind of falling off to the wayside because, like, well, we’re having professional tambe lanas, but they’re just gonna be dancing. They don’t go to the church with you. And so a lot of young women were actually opting out of having courts of honor, but they also opt out sometimes of having other women. Sometimes it was just all men, sometimes it was just all girls. But people were modifying that either based on budgets or just based on. 

 36:24
Rachel 
Again, I think about what I actually heard a young woman say, like, I don’t want any other girl in the picture, I want to just be me. So it’s her and seven young men. You’re like, okay, I guess. And part of this comes back to like, well, we’re paying for professional photographs. This is what I want. This is the aesthetic I want. And I thought, for me, that was really powerful, right? One, this idea of the visual narrative that they’re creating in the moment, but that they want to persist and kind of the audacity. I’m like, man, I don’t think I talked like that when I was 15. Like, I didn’t have any concept of that, but I believe that’s connected to sort of this connection to their lives being rooted in social media for so much longer. The idea, no, no. 

 37:06
Rachel 
This is going to be an outward facing event. This is about how I look, what I can post, what my family will post, what is the most flattering, you know? And so people very cognizant of the social curation of the event. And so, again, how people spend changes dramatically. Right? Whether it’s about limousines, whether it’s about food, whether it’s about professional dancers, all of that venues, right? All of that kind of compounds to where you get some very. You can get very large scale events. 

 37:40
Vanessa
So tell me, I’m really curious about these group dances. Are they, like, stuffy, or are they, like, doing, like, super choreography to, like, hip hop or, like, what. What do they look like? 

 37:56
Rachel 
All the above. So, okay, so traditional. Okay, so we think about quinceaneras. The roots very much are cultural practices of european court culture, right? So you have the idea, if you think about any. Any good Jane Austen period piece movie, right? And you have couples dancing in unison, kind of slow. That classic waltz has been always in part of the quinceanera. And you can think of it, even if you’re connected, right, in the south, to think about cotillions, right, teaching young men and young girls and boys to be young women and young men, right, gentility. And part of that is the couples dance. And so, for kin says it’s always been a group, couples dance. So the young woman and her escort and then, you know, seven other girls and their escorts. 

 38:39
Rachel 
And what people see sort of on the performance event itself that day of. Right, the party is couples dancing, you know, very basically, excuse me, learning a court waltz. They’re in unison. They’re very practiced and dignified for the most part. And the social background behind that is this for a lot of these, traditionally, this is a lot of. A lot of these kids, first time in that co ed situation, right? This idea of a young, like, you know, a 13 or 14 year old slow dancing with another 13 or 14 year old opposite sex. It’s usually kind of the first moment. So it’s sort of symbolizing the sort of transition into. You’re growing into these sort of new relationships potentially. Nobody wants anything to happen, but here’s a practice session. 

 39:29
Rachel 
You want to see what it’s like to sort of, you know, be in that kind of pseudo. That social proximity will give it to you. And so it’s, again, it’s supposed to be this symbolic, and it is usually kind of stuffy, right? But in the last 25 years, what you’ve got is, okay, I’ll do the stuffy dance, but I also want to do another dance. And so they enter the valley de surpressa, the surprise dance. And so you have what everyone expects to see, which is the court waltz, right? A classic song that people recognize the pace and things. And then you have a costume change, and sometimes it’s more elaborate, like it’s a full costume change. Or sometimes, you know, the young men take off their jackets, but the young women are come back out and, like, jean shorts and white tank tops. 

 40:15
Rachel 
And then they do whatever they want to do. And again, a lot of times, this is where the most effort has been placed. Right, on figuring out my surprise dance, because everyone expects the court waltz as sort of the. Oh, that’s a piece of the structural tradition. But the surprise dance, which we all. No one’s really surprised at now. They just call it a surprise dance, but they know it’s coming, right, is hip hop, it’s reggaeton, is whatever you want to be. A lot of this is really interesting because it really comes to reflect the young woman and her family and what they want or what she wants, right? So I’ve seen girls who are not sort of affiliated with, like, catholic or any kind of christian sort of religious tradition, but they’re more indigenously minded. 

 41:01
Rachel 
And so they do, like, ballet folklorico or Danza Azteca, something to reflect that aspect of their identity. And there are people that love to dance, and they’re like, oh, you know, I want to do sort of like the mexican or teno cowboy routine. And they do, right. It’s not uncommon. I see, you know, girls all over Texas in their cowboy boots with their Kinsey dresses, right. That is very regional. And so the dances come to reflect, like, who’s popular. I can only imagine how many times a young girl has choreographed with her and her friends around, like a Beyonce song or, like, you know, whoever’s popular at the moment to see what’s going on. So those end up being surprise dances, and I always think that’s when, you know, aunts and grandmothers get a little bit angry. Right. 

 41:47
Rachel 
You know, why are they moving like that? Why are they dressing like that? But it almost gives them an outlet for that kind of criticism, because across the board, it is a lot more open, and it is a lot more. The traditions have been a lot more welcoming of the girls saying, no, that’s not for me. Whether it’s I’m gonna wear pants or whether it’s I’m gonna wear red. Right. This idea of the capacity to say, you can be part of this. We want you to have this as part of your story, but on your terms. So, you know, I feel like a lot of levels. That’s what people are paying for, this opportunity to express themselves in this really public way. That’s. 

 42:22
Vanessa
That’s so fun. I. You know, I’m not a dancer, but I love seeing group dances, and I wish that was part of our culture more. Like, I wish that, like, we all just, like, learn these group dances, and we could just break out and dance, like, in musicals. 

 42:38
Rachel 
That would be great. I feel like high school music. Everyone just kind of, like, that’s the fantasy. Like, we’re all. But you realize if you think about it, right, it’s sort of the one. It. It’s joyous, right. Thinking a lot about the politics of being joyful. Right. Celebrating. And also the idea that for, you know, reality check culturally and socially. When I was talking to families, what really came, you know, because people talk about the cost or if it’s sexual or, you know, just this idea of high criticism. And what you really got was that families were like, this isn’t about telling her she’s old enough to have children or get married. This is telling her, enjoy your youth while you still have it. And so the idea that, oh, everything’s different. Well, sort of everything is changed. But really, it’s. 

 43:28
Rachel 
For the most part, it’s about saying you have a little more responsibility, but you’re still a kid, so you’re. So you need to go from your glam and your hair extensions and your full makeup and the stiletto heels, which, God knows how you walked in to your sneakers and your jeans and going back to your first year of high school or maybe your second year, depending on your age. And so there’s this. One of the things that I really? So the two things are this idea of this development of joy and this kind of appreciation that their daughters matter and their happiness matters. And I talk to families who are like, she’ll get married or she won’t. She’ll go to college. You know, she’ll have a future. But we want her to know that she’s loved and valued now. 

 44:09
Rachel 
And to me, growing up in a latino family, like, that’s huge. That’s not something that we get all the time. But it was also a lot of mothers who were working very hard and who never had the luxury of even being able to think about having one of these celebrations, kind of doubling down on understanding that successful people, particularly the United States, successful people, have good childhood. And so the idea was thinking about, I want my daughter to have good memories of her youth because somehow that precedes everything else she might be able to do later. And I was like, that’s deep. That’s powerful. You know, like, and you knew was coming from a place almost of hurt. Like, the idea of how much they struggled in their own lives. And so they’re saying, be young. You don’t have to work now. 

 45:02
Rachel 
Like, again, for most, you don’t have to work. You don’t have to hustle. You can go be 1415, enjoy yourself. Go to high school. Imagine the secret. And I think that’s one of the most powerful things that people are really dreaming through, right? So one of the first things in this book is, you know, thinking about keenness or potential, and that’s something people don’t really understand. I’ve gotten a lot of, over the years, lots of inquiries about, like, don’t you think these families spend too much money? Or don’t you think these families should learn how to spend? You learn how to, like, budget. I was like, first of all, that is not my priority in any way to tell people how to spend their money. 

 45:39
Rachel 
But at the same time, I think it was this idea of not being able to understand the value structure that people were coming from or what they hoped to build with sort of their families in the US as different from what they came from. I think it’s really significant because I speak the queue savannahs in the United States. One, because they’re pan Latino. Like, they’re, you know, they. Although the traditions that they follow tend to be those that came from Mexico proper, because it’s Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Dominicans, Nicaraguans. Whoever’s in the US, right, gets sort of that blanket umbrella term that it creates a different kind of pan latino community who are celebrating. Right? And so there’s a different kind of community building as a part of that. 

 46:23
Rachel 
But it’s also realizing that the tradition as it exists, like, in the continental United States, or even as people move across borders and go back and forth, whether it’s buying things or celebrating in different places, is that it couldn’t exist anywhere except in the United States. All of this, it’s really, to me, it’s an american, it’s a us american tradition, because you have influence from the diaspora of people. Like, oh, I have cousins in Mexico. I know what the styles are there. Or maybe a fashion designer saying, oh, yeah, I was doing work in Guatemala. So the fabrics, I can tell you what they’re using there, but it’s still happening in Vegas or Seattle or Nebraska somewhere, Omaha, you know. 

 47:01
Rachel 
And so there’s something about that I think is really powerful and with that connection with, like, social media, because that really was the heart of the time period where I, you know, you think about the slice of research that I’m doing, right? It was tiny, right. It was this very particular moment where you had these, this new moment of these consumer exhibitions, expositions, but you also absolutely had sort of social media was the center of people’s lives, particularly Facebook at the time for youth. Still, Facebook was huge piece of people’s lives that everything was about producing and Facebook and YouTube. And so I would talk to young girls who were like, oh, how you pick your. How are you gonna pick your dress? So they go on Google and like, you know, quinceanera dresses. What do quince dresses look like? 

 47:51
Rachel 
Or quinceaneta dresses by color, or they’d go on YouTube and they would see someone’s promotional video that someone’s videographer put up, and then they’d be inspired by that. And so the idea of possibilities, to me, wholly were accomplished by the imaginations of young women, either on their bodies or what they chose and created, that got put together and then circulated. And that becomes the potential, like, inspiration for another generation. So all of a sudden, it’s like, yes, we have to understand there is a consumer marketplace. Yes, it could exist without all of that, but together it produces something unique. And on some level, it really does cater to that. Like young teenage Latina girl saying, it’s me picking things and then creating a legacy for the next generation to keep or reject, really, or to build from. I think that’s powerful. 

 48:47
Vanessa
Yeah, absolutely. Well, let’s step back for a minute and talk about the quinceanera’s history. Like, how it even started, where it started, and the evolution to how it got today. 

 49:03
Rachel 
Yeah, that’s both an easy question and a hard question. It’s actually very. I think it’s very simple in many ways. But so here’s the thing. The way the quinceanera, there’s the idea of what can you actually prove? You know, what can you actually curate and say, oh, this is. Here’s the breadcrumbs that say, this is the historical arc. There’s that versus the stories people tell, and I think they’re equally important. So when I talk to people, when I was interviewing people and having our conversations about dresses or photos or food or anything to do with the celebration, and I asked people, oh, do you know where the tradition comes from? And they would often say it came from the Aztecs. And you realize that, like, okay, think about, like, I’m like, how deep are we going here? What are we thinking about? 

 50:03
Rachel 
But, you know, somewhere along the line, and this is true, you know, with actually thinking about some of the bias in scholarship, which was sort of Chicana, Mexican American, sort of scholars and artists talking about the history of coming of age rituals in different indigenous tribal communities in Latin America, which some like the Aztecs and the Maya. Right. And the other. The other sort of kingdoms that were prominent in different periods of the pre columbian times. Right. Yes. Coming of age rituals were important. Young women and young men were separated out at different times. And for the Aztecs in particular, because the documentation is so clear, you know, the young aztec girls, around 13 or so, were either sort of tracked for domestic life or educated life, which was more like a priestly class. Right. Were you going to be a. 

 50:58
Rachel 
Were you going to be helping priests in a temple, or were you going to be learning to do household work and be a mother or a family? And so people sort of interpreted and ran with that. They’re like, oh, this is sort of where this idea is coming from. From. And you can see that it’s clearly, it’s got a life. It must have a life in Mexico, and it must have all these things, and it eventually sort of migrated with people. There’s not a whole lot of evidence about sort of that direct connection. But when you’re looking at sort of the earliest documented instances of something that looks like a quinceanera in what we say is a quince, now, you’re thinking about the 1910s, 1920s in Texas and in northern Mexico, and we’re thinking a lot about post revolutionary Mexico. 

 51:45
Rachel 
So we’re thinking a lot about. And so this is where I’ll tell you what I have developed is my idea of sort of the tradition developing. Because, again, I don’t discount sort of this connection to people having memory and passion for indigenous roots that would include rituals. But the key to itself isn’t something you would have found in pre columbian Latin America. Because if you look at the quince itself, right. It is literally court rituals from Europe. So whatever it is, it’s post contact in what it’s produced. Right? The dresses, the waltzes, all of those things are european court customs. But it’s absolutely a blend. Right? Nothing, you know, it’s all blended. But how that blending came together is a little more confusing or a little less clear. So in my. It’s in my introduction, we’ll see. 

 52:37
Rachel 
I’m pretty sure thinking a little bit about sort of those origins. For me, it was super important to sort of say, look, well, there’s where people think it comes from, and that’s powerful because you realize that’s the narrative that they’re bringing intimately to what they’re doing. Right. I want to be close to those roots and so understanding. Okay, so what is that about? But the earliest sort of recorded quinces, sort of the quinceaneras, again, were the early 20th century, early decades of the 20th century, really post mexican revolution. And at this point in time, what you have are wealthy and middle class Mexicans moving north into the united states. You had a lot of people crossing borders and starting again with government upheaval. Folks weren’t able to keep their businesses or they won’t be able to raise their families the way they wanted. 

 53:26
Rachel 
And so they’re moving right this early. So diaspora, but they’re still remaining very much. They’ll be labeled Spanish or Mexican. Right. We’re talking about being in the borderlands in the american southwest. And what we find, again, is culture and transformation. Right. So what was very popular, and this is via a book called from out of the shadows, which is this famed mexican american historian, Vicki Ruiz, who writes all about women and women in the archive. And what is missing and thinking about, you know, what were women doing at this time when they didn’t have such a public record of their lives? And there’s this wonderful piece she writes about called Starstruck. 

 54:07
Rachel 
And it’s all about young, particularly mexican american or quote unquote, spanish women being sort of enamored with Hollywood glamour and Hollywood magazines and movies and thinking a little bit about wanting to be part of sort of this glamorous american pop culture scene, going to the movies, going to shops, buying makeup. But living under the cultural strictures of conservative and strict mexican families, right? Parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, they were still very much from Mexico with the culture of sort of that upper class conservatism. And they were probably young teenagers, or they came to the US and they were younger. And so she spoke of at this time period, young women were saying, well, I would like to go out and get a job. It was becoming more and more normalized. 

 54:56
Rachel 
But this idea of being out alone, there were still a lot of questions about honor and shame and what are you doing? And so even if young women worked, it was often that young women worked outside the home, came home and gave their check to their parents, their father. And she spoke of sort of the dislike of, like, I want to live. I’m making money so I can buy the things I want, and I’m not able to. And so she was saying at this, it was like the early 1930s that young women were at 1414, it was legal to run off and get married. And this is what girls were doing more than anything, was to try to gain freedom from these strict families in this new cultural environment. That said, there’s other ways people are being. 

 55:39
Rachel 
There’s other ways of socializing, there’s other ways to live your life. And I think when I think of the sort of that moment where 14 was this moment to say, I’d rather be under. I’d rather be away and moved out of my family and working and doing what I want with my money than staying under these strict rules, these strict households. And that was a problem for families. And I feel like the quinceanera really developed as a kind of compromise. Like, look, we’ll have a wedding like celebration. We will have a ritual acknowledging your coming of age. We’re going to mark you as a growing young woman, but you still live in our household. You’ll have some freedom, but you’re not an adult yet. 

 56:18
Rachel 
And what you get is something that also mirrors, because the idea with this idea of getting married and leaving, that was not typical of mexican culture. So part of this was also about retaining upper class mexican ness in the United States at a time when people were saying, we moved here, but we still want to be mexican. We left because we had to, because things were crumbling. So what you have is this courtly waltz, this really upper class sense of a dinner and a ball and respectable partners and no touching, you know, all very sort of controlled and elegant. And that’s meant to be sort of your entry into the society that we want you to engage with and talk to. But we’ll also offer you a little bit of freedom by publicly acknowledging that we see you as growing up. 

 57:08
Rachel 
In many ways, all the tie back to european court customs is really thinking about the upper class culture of Mexico and its connection to european court customs, particularly under the. Under the reign of Maximilian and Carlotta, sort of that period of Mexican Mexico being run by, you know, french aristocracy, right? So there’s this whole callback that’s very specifically about upper class mexican ness. And then once that tradition sort of, you know, it sort of develops again, but then it, like with any folklore, right? Once it’s out, and then it can grow, change, and shift. But so the idea of the history of itself, I think, is super muddled. It’s really thinking about what people have made of it. But in actuality, you didn’t really. 

 57:57
Rachel 
You didn’t see quinceaneras as you see them now, or even in their sort of more classic, like a dinner and a dance or a family dinner until the early 20th century. So even though there’s this rooting of ritual coming of age, there’s, you know, ritual coming of age celebrations across the globe, right? They’re not all leading towards the quince. It just happens to be the social and political circumstances of, I think, of greater Mexico, what it is in the United States today. 

 58:30
Vanessa
But unlike coming out in english society, there is a religious aspect to the quinceanere. Is that right? 

 58:40
Rachel 
There is the religious aspect, again, with this idea of respectability, politics, and upper class culture in Latin America that was always associated with the Catholic Church, when, in fact, in the hemispheric Americas, the Catholic Church didn’t actually acknowledge the quinceanera, as they call a sacramental until about 2008. So the Catholics, it’s always been like a handshake deal. It’s like, this is something our Hispanic Catholics do. But at any point, catholic priests at different parishes could say no, and they did. When I was in the midwest, I would talk to young women who lived in small town Midwest who maybe were the only latino part of the only latino family. And it’s like, oh, we couldn’t have a quince because the priest said it wasn’t something he knew how to do or they didn’t want to do it, they didn’t like it. 

 59:29
Rachel 
So without a sort of critical mass of Latino Catholics, it wasn’t something that necessarily would get done. But what I thought was really interesting was families who were really invested in wanting their daughter to have the celebration, would leave the church, would go find another sort of community. And this is where I noticed, and I was really interested, right? Because I didn’t really think about the religious aspect as much. The idea that there was a lot of protestant quinces, and they were. You’re asked, like, how could you have a protestant quinceanera? And if you think about it, because it was never really officially about the church. It’s really about the people. And so if the protestant church was willing to allow families to learn and celebrate, you know, we think about the quinceanera as having this blessing component, right? And the Catholic Church, there’s. 

 01:00:17
Rachel 
It’s called a misa de gracias, like a Thanksgiving mass. They’re giving thanks for this young woman, and it’s a reaffirmation of a young woman’s baptismal promises. What you’re thinking, the questions they ask are literally about denying the devil and staying pure. And I actually talked with young women who said, you know, when they told me what, I renounced the devil, and I said no, they just kept going. Like, people that have sort of, like, didn’t really believe in the church aspect of it, but were, like, my parents or someone wants me to do this, but they sort of laughed at, like, being able to sort of pick at some of those traditional elements that they just didn’t. They didn’t believe in. But again, the compromise of the celebration. 

 01:01:02
Rachel 
So I met lots of young women who had blessings from a pastor or, you know, a non denominational reverend or someone come in that wasn’t a full math, right? That was done at their home that had a very. Just had a different tenor to it, but the function was the same. And what it came down to was, we’re grateful you’re alive, we’re grateful you’re here, and we have nothing but hope for your future. And that’s really what it came down to. It didn’t necessarily have to come down to maintaining virginity or maintaining. Because for the catholic celebration, I thought this. It’s really interesting to me is, you know, for Catholics in the Quien Savannah celebration, even before it was official, right, it was always about leaving fresh flowers for the Vita de Guadalupe was always part of this celebration honoring Christ’s mother. 

 01:01:53
Rachel 
And I wrote a paper, probably in grad school somewhere, about the, you know, how hard is it for young woman to live up to, you know, virgin motherhood? Like that’s, you know, thinking. Because one of the ideas that always comes up with the conflict with religion, religious ideas as well. You know, people are condoning young women to have sex. Like, no, we’re not. The idea, though, is the church is very heavily invested in using quinceaneras as teaching moments from which where Catholicism and the values of Catholicism can be front and center. And honestly, for the most part, it’s not the case in terms of families. And a lot of times, families come back to the church so they could have the kings in the church. And I laugh. 

 01:02:39
Rachel 
I talked to a variety of churches, old, beautiful churches that were sort of up in arms about how often they’re like, you know, we’re booked for months. We’re booked for six months because people want to have photos in their beautiful. With their beautiful antique chandeliers, and they get, you know, like, okay. Like, you know, part of me is like, what do you want me to say? Like, people know what they want. But it’s also, you know, it. At one point, it was more popular. I never saw that really happening. But I know in Texas, where the tradition goes deeper, you might have multiple quinceanera celebrating together. And that is not the cost. Share the cost. Now it’s like, it’s about $1500 for the church, $1500 for your Saturday afternoon at the church, and that’s the family. So the idea. 

 01:03:30
Rachel 
So, so the way that I think about the catholic church in particular is that in 2008, so that’s really late in the game, 2008, when the church was saying, oh, we’ve officially released a mass for quinceanera. That’s official that all priests can use, right? All of a sudden, it kind of became a conversation about. A conversation about audience and saying, we want to. The hispanic church is losing Catholics. Losing Latino Catholics. And so this idea of like, oh, no, we’re on the same team or we’re working together. And so for me, the church was just, was what was another sort of marketing entity, right, to tell you what to wear, what not to wear, how to celebrate. And people had other people doing that as well. So it was another competing voice. 

 01:04:19
Rachel 
And so I don’t do, you know, and I think most of the work that’s been done about quinceanes has worked with churches specifically. But part of me was saying, you know, the church. And I was, you know, I was like, I’m just gonna come at it from a different angle. The church narrative wasn’t necessarily the one that I wanted, but also after finding that it wasn’t even one that existed in a kind of solid practice, to me, almost felt disrespectful. I was like, Hispanic Catholics have been your bread and butter for millennia, and they couldn’t even get something in writing until the early two thousands and people were devout, right. So I think that it’s an interesting symbol of like, oh, wait, we need to respond to this community, right? 

 01:05:01
Rachel 
Because the church has played a huge role, I think continues to play a role, but it’s competing. It’s competing with Disney and it’s competing with custom dressmakers and it’s competing with Danta Azteca and other ritual celebrations. So the church doesn’t really have. And competing with other faith communities to say, hey, we like that too. We will bless your daughter if you’re in our community. So this idea that the community’s demand for both attention and acknowledgement, right. As consumers, but also as faith based consumers, right. I think is saying something about communities changing and growing. 

 01:05:42
Vanessa
So what about the boys in the latino communities? Do they have any sort of equivalent. 

 01:05:49
Rachel 
Celebration of their own? No. Like, not specifically. So here’s the thing. So one in the last, again, remember the last ten years, seeing young men having quinces is more and more popular. Often they’re upper class, they’re people with money. And it’s, again, it’s a coming out. It’s a display of gratitude. People are like, oh, it doesn’t just have to be for gratitude. It doesn’t. But one of the values that’s always been stuck, the gendered values that have been sort of the silent part of particularly Mexican american, sort of machista family values, right? Patriarchal family values, is that a woman, this idea that a woman has these external markers that have to be met before she can be seen as an adult, whereas men aren’t. Men don’t need to have that to have freedom. 

 01:06:47
Rachel 
And so the idea is men don’t need a Quince, to celebration, to shave or to buy the sneakers they want or to go out with their friends. They can do that anyway. If anything, it’s sort of the opposite, where young men are perceived to have the freedom, but they also don’t have the responsibility until they’ve already left home, and they don’t need to leave home until they get married for women. So marriage is a sort of symbolize different things, right? That idea of young woman saying, I’m gonna get married, I’m gonna be out of here. I might be connected to another man, but at least I’ll be away from sort of my natal household. 

 01:07:22
Rachel 
And for young men, that the pattern was he’s gonna stay at home as long as possible where his mother will cook for him and wash his underwear until someone else is gonna do it. And so for the what? So now, yes. You have people doing more quinceaneros or sort of modifying it. That’s for. I would say for people, wealthy folks or people who. Communities are just more open. You also have a trend where you might have queer kids who either they’re queer young men or women. Right. In different sort of states of gender presentation that might find it appealing. Right. Maybe it’s a full on, like, I’m going to come out and address as my first sort of moment of being trans feminine or transmasculine these different ways. But again, it’s more open now. But in terms of actual. 

 01:08:09
Rachel 
I would say the actual markers of. I still feel like the Quintanetta serves as a marker for young men in the community, because I had this great story from one young man who told me. He’s like, man, I knew when I came of age because. I’m sorry. 

 01:08:28
Vanessa
Is it an Amber alert? 

 01:08:31
Rachel 
I’m sorry that they knew they came of age because someone asked them to sponsor the cake. And they had always been an escort. They had always been like. And that was like. It was like, because they were saying, oh, yeah, my cousin wanted me to participate. He was all ready to be like his suit and dance. Like, oh, no. For money, for the cake, because you’re now too old. You’ve aged out of that role. And so to me, I was like, there you go. Sort of understanding where your responsibility in the community lies. You are now seen as an adult. So it’s financial resources, not necessarily your body in person, your skills, dancing, because that wouldn’t work anymore. So I think there’s a lot of ways in which the tradition itself exposes these little cracks in perceptions of, oh, no. 

 01:09:18
Rachel 
You see yourself as a kid, but we see you as someone who works and lives, you know, lives on your own and should really be giving us money for it, you know, for. To support the celebration. But yourself are no longer young enough to be sort of part of the ritual. And so I think there’s. Yeah, there’s lots of ways that the ritual tells these different stories and sort offers opportunities, right, to sort of understand the community story, but on. On the terms of the community. And that’s always been sort of my. My favorite thing about folklore is telling students, like, this is about learning how communities communicate. So, thinking about, you know, cake, how does cake communicate? Right? Who’s paying for it. How do we understand that to fit into the ceremony as opposed to a different role? 

 01:10:03
Vanessa
Yeah. 

 01:10:04
Rachel 
Yeah. 

 01:10:04
Vanessa
So we’re coming to the end of our conversation, but what do you feel is the overarching message of your book? What do you feel like you wanted people to take from. From your book? 

 01:10:17
Rachel 
There’s a few things. One is that, for me, thinking about creativity as not only in the wheelhouse of the formerly educated or the wealthy. Right. Creativity, anyone can be creative. And the Quintaya traditions, to me, no matter how much people talk about investing money or that it’s a consumer exercise, to me, it’s this beautiful, creative combination of ages and generations and knowledge and change that I respect and that, I think, continues to tell a community story from a community perspective. The second bit of that is about value and thinking about stories of mothers and daughters and grandmothers and fathers, too, but mostly women saying, I didn’t feel valued as a young woman, and I want my daughter to know what that feels like unconditionally. So it isn’t about whether she goes to college or whether she gets married. 

 01:11:13
Rachel 
It’s telling her that she can be 15 and just some kid teenager, and we love her and we value her, and we see her future as undeniably open. Right. And that was consistent. Right. This idea of how proud these mothers were. And all I could think about in my head was my dad saying, what have they done? And the fact that they didn’t have to do anything. Right. For this sort of pride, and thinking about how that fits into family histories and community narratives and how that changes. Right. How some people can feel about themselves. The third thing is actually where I leave off in the book at the end, which is thinking about this idea of desire. And to me, the kinse creates a space for which young girls can have a preference for something and then say, I have a preference. 

 01:11:59
Rachel 
They can say, I want something, and I don’t want something, I want it. And this is why. And actually have this ability to negotiate and say, but I like pink, or I like purple, or, I like the shape of this, or, I absolutely don’t want roast beef, I want tacos. 

 01:12:13
Vanessa
Right. 

 01:12:14
Rachel 
This ability to just practice communicating your preferences. As someone who grew up in a very strict, conservative household, if you don’t learn how to say what you want, you’ll just accept anything. And so where my book ends is thinking about the politics of desire and how idealized women in, from a catholic sort of cultural perspective, the idealized woman wants nothing. All she does is give and sacrifice. And so what does it mean to say to our young women? It’s okay to want things. It’s okay to want to be seen. It’s okay to want to beautiful. It’s okay. That’s not all of you, but it can be part of you. And that really changes people’s sense of how much they’re allowed to value themselves. 

 01:12:59
Rachel 
And so that is, I think, one of the biggest aspects that where I learned from the kinse and thinking about what that means, it’s like, oh, my God. For you to be able to say, I want this or I don’t want this, and then in this particular event in their life, having that means something. Okay, we’ll get the stretch. We’ll get the pink stretched Hummer if that’s what you want for this event. Right. And seeing those choices manifest into something. Right. And then, you know, watching girls, you know, break out into tears because they’re thanking their parents for, you know, this event and everything, and realizing that those moments of gratitude, watching all that kind of happen and transpire, was good for everybody. It was good for the family. 

 01:13:43
Rachel 
But I think that idea of being able to say, I have the right to want things, and that’s okay, that’s part of my life, is one of the biggest tools that follow those girls, follows these generations of girls for years into the future. 

 01:13:59
Vanessa
I really love that. That is not something that I had even. That had even crossed my mind about these celebrations. But I think that is so important. I mean, even as, you know, someone passed that age period, I still think I’m a mom. And so I’m surrounded by a lot of moms all the time, but it’s sometimes still difficult to ask for what I want and what I need. And I think that is so important to express to girls, that it is important to say what you need and what you want. 

 01:14:37
Rachel 
Absolutely. And as a mom myself was writing with my little boy. He’s only nine now, but that idea of saying, like, what do we pass forward? Right. That idea of saying, you can say what you want, you don’t always get it, but to be able. But to not have the skill of expressing it. Right. Waiting till you’re 35 and divorced, that’s me. Yeah. To express what that is like, you could save yourself a lot of heartache, I could save you a lot of hurt just by saying you have a choice and you can assert your choice. To me, that’s been the most powerful element of hearing these stories and writing about the ginta. 

 01:15:14
Vanessa
Absolutely. Well, is there anything that we’ve missed, anything that we haven’t covered. That was an important. 

 01:15:20
Rachel 
No, no, I think this was great. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the conversation. 

 01:15:25
Vanessa
It took so many different turns that I did not expect and was so beautiful. And you were writing in the, you know, I didn’t read the entire book, but the parts that I read, there were so many quotes that were just really beautifully written. So I encourage anyone who has an interest in this, I will put the link up on our website because it was just, it was really beautifully written and it’s written for the larger audience. 

 01:15:51
Rachel 
Right. 

 01:15:51
Vanessa
It’s written in popular culture. So it’s not just an academic book. 

 01:15:55
Rachel 
It’s not just an academic book. 

 01:15:57
Vanessa
Yeah. So we will thank you so much for joining us. This was, this was a wonderful conversation. 

 01:16:03
Rachel 
Thank you. 

 01:16:04
Vanessa
And for those listeners, I’m going to put the link up on our website, which is www.fabricoffolklore.com. And we thank you so much, folksy folks, for joining us on this quinceanetta journey. And we want to hear from you. If you are from the Latina Latino community, did you have one of these quinceanera celebrations and what did you experience? Or did you not have one and you wish you did or you provided one for your child? We want to continue this conversation. And you can do that by commenting, either if you’re watching on YouTube or if you follow us on our Facebook group page, we have, we pose these conversation starters so that people can have these conversations. Because I don’t want this podcast just to be out there for people to still listen to. 

 01:16:53
Vanessa
I want it to be an interactive experience for people to continue these important conversations. So we are on Facebook. We have a page and a group. We’re also on Instagram and sometimes on Twitter x and on LinkedIn. So you sparsely on those social media so you can find us there. And if you were enjoying the show, I highly suggest that you subscribe and like comment and share it with your bestie. If you were helping, if you want to see us grow, sharing it with your friends and family is so incredibly helpful. And until next time, keep the folk alive.