Quinceara Style: Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781477319697)

Winner of the Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies, Popular Culture Association
Co-winner of the Elli Kongas Maranda Prize, Women's Section of the American Folklore Society (AFS)

A dynamic study of social negotiation and consumerism in the coming-of-age quinceara celebration and the impact of normalizing spectacles of luxury.

Quinceara celebrations, which recognize a girl's transition to young womanhood at age fifteen, are practiced in Latinx communities throughout the Americas. But in the consumer-driven United States, the ritual has evolved from a largely religious ceremony to an elaborate party where social status takes center stage. Examining the many facets of this contemporary debut experience, Quinceara Style reports on ethnographic fieldwork in California, Texas, the Midwest, and Mexico City to reveal a complex, compelling story. Along the way, we meet a self-identified transwoman who uses the quinceara as an intellectual space in her activist performance art. We explore the economic empowerment of women who own barrio boutiques specializing in the quinceara's many accessories and made-in-China gowns. And, of course, we meet teens themselves, including a vlogger whose quince-planning tips have made her an online sensation.

Disrupting assumptions, such as the belief that Latino communities in the United States can't desire upward mobility without abandoning ethnoracial cultural legacies, Quinceara Style also underscores the performative nature of class and the process of constructing a self in the public, digital sphere.

Author: Rachel Valentina Gonz疝ez
ISBN-10: 1477319697
ISBN-13: 9781477319697
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Language: English
Published: 11/15/2019
Pages: 232
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.80d