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The Quinceañera CrazeWhat is the real message of the coming-of-age bash?

By Liza MundyPosted Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2007, at 4:05 PM ET

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Of course, a simple party can't be blamed for all, or even any, of this. The quince may well be more symptom than cause. It is notable that the quinceañera, which originated as a prelude to a wedding, in this country seems to have become a substitute for the wedding a girl may never have. One of Alvarez's central questions is why parents are willing to spend so much arduously earned money—the average price of a quince is $5,000; the colloquial phrase for giving a party you can't afford is "throwing the house out the window"—on a one-night blowout. The answer is that for many of these girls, a quince is the only blowout her parents can be sure of giving.

Alvarez, who emigrated with her professional-class family from the Dominican Republic as a girl, tends to maintain a fretful but fond attitude toward this well-intended excess, which she captures vividly: There is one surreal scene where a high-end quince—including a "mariachi serenade, a Hummer limo … as well as a two-person crew filming the whole day and night"—takes place in a Gulf Coast hotel inundated by evacuees from Hurricane Rita. She is loath to criticize, even as she clearly thinks parents would do better to save for college. Her delicacy is understandable, yet frustrating, too. "Rather than tail the stressed quinceaneara asking questions, I'm going to go sit in the living room out of her way," she writes, when describing preparations for the quince that provides the central narrative of the book. When the girl actually begins vomiting just before her ceremony, Alvarez retreats to a spot on the steps. Curiously, given Alvarez's stature as a poet and fiction writer—one of her best-known novels, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, is itself an evocative coming-of-age story—the girls themselves do not emerge as rounded characters. What do their lives consist of? Their dreams? Their days? Their conversations?

Instead, we get descriptions of Alvarez's own adolescent struggles—with her strict mother, primarily—which are riveting but not always relevant. Alvarez never had a quince herself, and her issues growing up as the child of a political refugee in the 1960s don't necessarily reflect the lives of modern-day economic immigrants. I found myself wishing Alvarez would phone the nauseated quince girl after the ceremony and ask: So, why were you vomiting? Was it nothing more than jitters and hunger? How dizzying is it to be caught between conventional old-world expectations and typical American license?

Still, in her empathetic if sometimes indirect way, Alvarez subtly homes in on the unsettling question at the heart of the festivities, which is whether these girls are being served, or undermined, by what many girls themselves describe when they write to her as their "right of passage." In America, they are acquiring a sense of materialistic entitlement—that much is clear—but are they coming away with anything else, less concrete, more useful, to face their future lives? The quince, rather than a turning point, may in fact be an enchanting distraction from what adults feel they truly owe them but can't provide: a sense of purpose.