Sweet 15
The rise of the all-out, over-the-top, super-spectacular, bank-breaking quinceañera.
Elizabeth Miranda, photographed on December 19, 2008, in McAllen.
Photograph by Sarah Wilson
“The theme is going to be pink diamonds,” Elizabeth Miranda was telling me, trying to make herself heard over the mariachis who were serenading a nearby table. We were sitting in the corner of a mostly empty Mexican restaurant in McAllen, and Elizabeth was wearing pink sweatpants, a pink hoodie, a pink T-shirt, pink-and-white Nikes, and pink nail polish. Even the tiny rubber bands on her braces were pink. It was two weeks before her fifteenth birthday, and she and her mother, Bertha Lopez, had agreed to meet me to discuss Elizabeth’s upcoming quinceañera, the “sweet fifteen” celebration that would mark her transition into adulthood and reaffirm her commitment to Catholicism.
“Everything is going to be pink,” Elizabeth was saying. “And there’s going to be a chocolate fountain and an ice sculpture that looks like a diamond—” She could hardly get the words out fast enough. She was pretty and petite, with a luminous complexion and dark brown hair that ran all the way down her back. “My court is going to do a waltz with me, and then we’re going to do the cha-cha, but a hip-hop version,” she said. “I have the most amazing choreographer.”
Bertha smiled at her daughter’s enthusiasm. “When I was her age, I wanted a sweet sixteen—something really American, you know?” she told me. She was thin and high-energy; when she spoke, she emphasized her words with her hands. “But things have changed so much. Now most of Elizabeth’s friends are having quinceañeras. She went to four just last month.”
Elizabeth nodded wearily and then exhaled. “Some girls ask for a trip instead, or they want a car,” she said. “But you can always take a trip. And you have to get a car when you go to college, anyway.”
“Oh, really?” Bertha said, turning in her chair. “You have to get a car?”
“I’m just saying—you only turn fifteen once,” Elizabeth said. “It’s now or never. You only get one chance to have a quinceañera.”
Bertha laughed. “My quinceañera was much simpler than Elizabeth’s will be,” she said. “My mom made my dress. The party was in the parish hall of our church, and my family prepared the food—mole, beans, and rice. We had mariachis, but I didn’t have a court, so I just danced with my cousins.” She sighed. “It was perfect, but Elizabeth’s quinceañera has to be more than perfect,” she said.
“Mom, it will be amazing,” Elizabeth said.
“I’m in the position that I can offer her more than I had, and I’m proud that I can do that,” Bertha explained. She was a receptionist at a local bank, she told me, and her husband was in construction. “We’re not rich, but we’ve been saving for this for a long time,” she said.
“Mom’s been thinking about my quinceañera since the day I was born!” Elizabeth added.
“It’s true,” Bertha said. “In my family, you have to have a quinceañera. There’s no getting out of it. I never gave her an option.”
“I always wanted one, anyway,” Elizabeth said. “I mean, I’m proud of my culture. And I wanted a pretty dress. And a big party.”
“A quinceañera is like a wedding without the groom and the commitment,” Bertha said. “But you still have all the stress, all the money . . .” She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Elizabeth actually had the audacity to ask me the other day, ‘So, Mom, what are you going to give me for my birthday?’ And I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ ”
“You know, a nice dinner, a cake . . .” Elizabeth said, giggling.
“Mind you, I’ve been planning this party for a year and a half,” Bertha said. “We sent out two hundred invitations, and I glued fifteen pink rhinestones onto every single one. I’ve glued them onto forks, cake plates, champagne flutes. Our kitchen is covered in pink rhinestones. My husband walked in the other night and said, ‘You didn’t do any of this when we got married!’ And I said, ‘That was just our wedding,’ ” she remembered, laughing. “‘This is our daughter’s
I had come to the Rio Grande Valley in hopes of understanding why lavish quinceañeras have suddenly become so popular. What used to be a simple, down-home tradition—a pale pink dress, a blessing at the church, and a backyard fiesta with some barbacoa and a norteño band and papel picado for decoration—has morphed into something grander, pricier, showier, more American. Just a decade ago, no one could have foreseen the stretch Humvees; the catered sit-down dinners for four hundred; the grand entrances on carriages and thrones; the smoke machines and light shows and music videos starring the birthday girl; the baroque floor-length dresses with gigantic hoop skirts; the professional dance troupes of teenage boys who bump and grind in unison; the brand-new cars that are driven onto dance floors and presented to girls too young to have driver’s licenses; the budgets that rival—and sometimes even surpass—those of weddings. “Nowadays if you have a traditional quinceañera, people think it’s boring,” Elizabeth’s choreographer, Nadia Valdez, told me. “People expect a big production. They want costume changes; they want something totally original; they want to see la quinceañera thrown into the air. They want to be entertained.”
The first quinceañera I attended, at a sprawling ranch in La Feria, a dozen miles north of the border, featured an obstacle course, a rock-climbing wall, a karaoke machine, a snow-cone truck, and a poolside dance party with a deejay who blasted Justin Timberlake’s “Bringing SexyBack.” The girl of the hour, a willowy redhead named Andrea Treviño, swayed to the music in a silk shantung cocktail dress that was less confining than the enormous white gown she had been blessed in by her parish priest that afternoon. “My quinceañera is as untraditional as it can possibly be, because I’m untraditional,” Andrea told me. “I’ve got the dress, but that’s it. The other stuff is, I don’t know, just uncool, I guess.” (When a friend urged her to do the Macarena, she rolled her eyes.) Andrea was funny and down-to-earth, hardly the spoiled rich girl who might have played the starring role in this celebration, given that her father, Joe, had made a small fortune in biomedical testing and sales. Still, the setting for her quinceañera exuded a sense of privilege, from the Longhorn cattle and horses that grazed in the pasture behind the Treviños’ five-bedroom ranch house to her father’s second car, a pristine Corvette Z06, which he drives only once a week. Yet because Andrea had nixed any formalities, like having a court of teenage attendants who would flank her during her debut or waltzing with her father, I was told by several guests and her mother, Christina, that this was “a low-key quinceañera.”
So what, I wondered, would qualify as over-the-top? Some inquiries turned up fantastic stories, which were true, of a Phantom of the Opera—themed quinceañera that Alonzo Cantú, a prominent McAllen homebuilder, and his wife, Yoli, had thrown for their daughter in 2007. At the Cantús’ behest, the Cimarron country club had been transformed for one night into the Paris Opera House, replete with velvet curtains, chandeliers, candelabras, and floor-to-ceiling murals of a balcony and a descending staircase. The chairs had been wrapped in melon-colored taffeta that had matched fifteen-year-old Allysa Cantú’s couture gown. There had been a band for the adults and a deejay for the teenagers, as well as a sit-down dinner for six hundred featuring filet mignon and hand-wrapped chocolates bearing the birthday girl’s likeness. Allysa and her court had performed a waltz in masquerade and then a hip-hop routine that had involved backflips and matching homegirl outfits. Between costume changes, Allysa had showcased her singing voice by turning in a pitch-perfect rendition of the treacly Andrew Lloyd Webber ballad “Think of Me.” So many guests were in attendance that she and her court had done a repeat performance in the adjacent ballroom. “My husband said, ‘Don’t do it cheap, don’t cut any corners,’ ” Yoli told me when I visited her palatial home, whose walls were lined with signed photographs of her family with Bill and Hillary Clinton. “And I said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, honey. I won’t!’ ”
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