Sweet 15

Every tradition has its own rite of passage. I'll never forget my Bat Mitzvah even though I did forget my Bat Mitzvah speech. Lately the Mexican tradition of quinceañera has been getting a lot of attention both in the popular culture and from marketers. I went and saw the indie flick "Quinceañera" on Friday night and was pleasantly surprised. It actually tackled two taboo issues in Hispanic culture that you rarely see done from an insider perspective: homosexuality and teen pregnancy.

When I worked at Teen Voices, we often lost Hispanic teen girls to motherhood. At 14-17, if they got pregnant, they would just disappear into their homes where their extended family would support them and their child. Having an abortion was never an option and dropping out of school was common. While I'm sure these girls' parents were disappointed, there was a higher level of acceptance around teen pregnancy as an unfortunate fact of life. This stands in sharp contrast to the upper middle class white girls I grew up with in Nashville who either had abortions or quietly moved in with a relative in another state.

What I loved about this movie was that it showed the full range of emotions around a 14-year-old girl discovering she's pregnant before her quinceañera. The denial, the lack of understanding around how doing everything but can still get you pregnant. The way her religious father couldn't really deal, but her mother and the other women around her just shook their heads and still embraced her. The way her boyfriend's mother (her boyfriend was a straight A student) quickly denied her son's culpablity, changed his cell phone number and shipped him out of town. And most of all, how her great uncle took her in with complete unconditional love and acceptance, just as he had her cousin, who looked like a gang banger but who was gay. It's one of my favorite movie archs: Families of choice and how outcasts form them together.

The other aspect of quinceañeras that you see in the film is how much these families (who aren't wealthy) spend on this big event — they are literally like junior weddings. The dress, the flowers, the tuxedos, the must-have Hummer-limo, the party, DJ, etc. Personally I find the mini-wedding aspect and the daddy's little girl is all grown up now aspect a little unsettling. But I also find the trend of having to spend gobs of money on these rites of passage whether it's a Bat Mitzvah, quinceañera or sweet 16 a little sad. I'm all for ritual, but at what point is the beauty and meaning of the ritual completely overtaken by consumerism? That said, despite all of the hoopla that went into planning my own wedding, I was still somehow able to focus on the meaning behind the pomp and circumstance standing on the beach under the chupah with my husband.

P.S. Check out these quinceañera photographs from this weekend's L.A. Times magazine.

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