Quinceañera Style by Rachel González

Author:Rachel González [González, Rachel Valentina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

MADE IN MEXICO, USA

Beauty Professionals and the Manufacturing of Quinceañera Beauty Culture

When I walked toward one of the marked ballrooms at the Double Tree in Commerce, California, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was greeted initially by a doorman checking tickets, which made me feel as though I were entering an exclusive space, a sentiment I felt was intentional, as tickets were being sold to see and speak with cultural producers whose work would be otherwise free to browse outside the expo space. The doors were flanked by two six-foot-tall, roll-out, portable signs—each with a six-by-two-foot image of a Quinceañeras Magazine cover girl. Larger than life, these images displayed the aggressive visual styling of expo events as spaces of the production of the young Latina form and also one of exposure. I walked in and was greeted by a wall of sound with a heavy bass beat. It was difficult to hear anyone, but I could see everything. Lights from media vendor booths flashed and spun, and from the stage a swirl of multicolored spotlights added to a partylike atmosphere that supported the DJ’s vigorous party sounds. Everything I was seeing was for sale in one form or another, all with customizable options. The lights on the stage reminded onlookers that there would soon be a quinceañera runway show featuring trends in quince style for the fall 2011 season. The vendor lights mirrored the energy of the stage lighting and implied that such a stage could also be re-created for personal use at a quinceañera event. Then I saw what I had yet to see at another expo in California. A life-size cardboard cutout of a quinceañera girl in her full formal gown, posing as though she was leaning against a tree, a stereotypical quinceañera photo pose in portraiture posted online and seen in photo albums. As I stared at it, attempting to take a picture around the crowds that were forming for the promotional goodie bags from the same table, the expo staffer Armando asked if I wanted to “take a picture with the quinceañera” and laughed. In that moment I realized that the image of the quinceañera was circulating and doing work in the community long after the event was over.

The future orientation of the quinceañera experience is manifest through the changes a young woman undergoes in a physically transformative process romantically expressed in narratives of coming of age or implications of social maturation through an idealized sense of responsibility for family and community. In reality, such transformation is made material through the manipulation of the female form through beauty technologies. The practice of the quinceañera event recasts spaces as ritual locations where social evolution becomes a ballroom’s or church vestibule’s central focus of a given day, but it is the intimate location of the body that undergoes the most striking visible changes for the sake of presenting the possibility of a successful future. The Latina teenage body thus becomes a site of cultural transition where

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