Last month when J and I spent a long weekend visiting family in Houston, we saw a teenage girl in frilly pink finery posing for pictures aboard the Battleship Texas, her Kate Winslet “queen of the world” Titanic moment at the bow of the ship back-dropped by the nearby San Jacinto Monument.
“This is a popular place for Quinceañera pictures,” J’s niece noted, and both she and I explained to J the coming-of-age celebration that Mexican families typically throw for daughters on the occasion of their fifteenth birthday. “It’s like sweet sixteen,” J’s niece observed: a ceremonial celebration of a girl’s passage into womanhood, with appropriately feminine finery. When J expressed amazement that any girl would want to pose for a pink and frilly photo-shoot on a retired battleship, I shrugged. Is a war monument any less appropriate for coming-of-age pictures than a harborside Presidential library is for wedding photos?
I forgot all about this anonymous girl and her sweet fifteen photo-shoot until yesterday, when I realized that crabapples, cherries, and other flowering fruit trees get to pose for pink and frilly Quinceañera pictures every year.
Apr 24, 2010 at 11:43 pm
Evidently it’s a Central American custom, too. I’ll be curious to see if my half-Honduran niece Eva gets a quinceañera next year.
Apr 25, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Yes, it’s a widespread Latin American custom, not just Mexican. In Texas, obviously, there is a greater influx of Mexican over other Latin American cultures…but even as a teenager in Ohio, I had Mexican-American friends who celebrated their 15th birthday with a fancy party, etc.
Apr 25, 2010 at 6:41 pm
I had really planned to have a dyslexic quinceañera for my last birthday, but ran out of steam. One has more energy (and papa is paying) when one is really 15.
Apr 25, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Oh, too bad you didn’t do that…I would have loved to have seen you in one of these dresses.