Chronicle of 15th birthday celebrations casts a spell

More than 400,000 Latina girls turn 15 each year in the United States, we're told in the thorough, agreeable new nonfiction book "Once Upon a Quinceañera" by Julia Alvarez. And if you don't happen to have one of these impending 15-year-olds close by, then consider "Quinceañera" an ample stand-in. This book is a journey into experiencing a vital, exuberant coming-of-age ritual of modern Latino life.

Yes modern, as Alvarez points out in her one-year examination of the all-out celebration thrown when a girl turns 15. If the tradition is rooted in Mayan and/or Aztec rites as Alvarez confirms, the events have become thoroughly Americanized, remade into lavish pageants embraced most passionately by second- and third-generation Latinas.

These young ladies of today feel entitled to be celebrated — los quince is their right as much as it is a rite — so in Miami, in New York, in Los Angeles, girls pore over Quince Girl magazine and log on to quinceañera Web sites to pick out the precise pink color of their dress, only then to imagine just how she'll top off her cascade of curls with a tiara. A court of 14 couples usually accompanies her into the church (for a priest's blessing), then onto the dance floor where she'll waltz to Julio Iglesias, every magical minute captured by a photographer or videographer treating her like Hollywood royalty which, at this moment, she is.

The subject was treated wonderfully in the 2006 feature film "Quinceañera" by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, which told the story of both a girl and an entire Los Angeles neighborhood in transition. Here then is Alvarez's equally warm yet critical look: How reasonable is it that working-class — even poor — Latinos insist on spending tens of thousands of dollars on such lavish affairs?

Alvarez is a terrific chronicler of Latino life, la reina, if you will, since authoring that must-read coming-of-age story, "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents." The author of four other books of fiction, a book of essays, five collections of poetry, five books for children and currently a writer in residence at Vermont's Middlebury College, Alvarez was asked by an editor to examine these 15th-birthday events. Born and raised in the Dominican Republic until joining her family as a teenage immigrant in the '60s in Queens, N.Y., Alvarez never had a quinceañera. So in the opening pages of her book she tells of her curiosity as well as her sense of responsibility for writing the book: As a baby-boomer Latina, it's up to her generation to take a look at what cultural traditions are being passed on to this next, booming population.

Hers is an impassioned, judicial examination of both the extravagance and the emotion behind these celebrations, which in turn becomes a portrait of not only the changing Latino communities but of the country as a whole. And as an author, Alvarez is a terrific tour guide: immersing us into every aspect of the spectacle — from the cake makers to the seamstresses to the photographers — all the while letting us hear the voices of the Mexican-American, Peruvian, Panamanian girls ("It's like part of my culture") as well as those of their parents.

She presents her reportage as two stories: chronicling the quinceañera of Monica Ramos (an alias, Alvarez notes, so as not to embarrass her or her family while also giving the author the freedom to be skeptical) and her own childhood (the second daughter of a doctor father, Alvarez went to boarding school and then found herself straddling two worlds). And this approach works. No Latina could possibly write so extensively about this subject without starting to recall her own dreams and disappointments along the way. And no Latina reading the book can avoid thinking of her own journey, whether it be recalling her own quinceañera or the many ways her own family pushed and hoped for her to succeed.

Which is why Alvarez's book, packed with all sorts of references to studies on culture, gender, sexuality, literature and religion, is such a prize, particularly if you're Latina and you've started to (again) examine how your own ethnicity and culture fit into the mainstream. In reporting this book, Alvarez discovers that quinceañeras, despite their cost and impermanence, are meant to affirm these girls, bringing together a community applauding, advocating on behalf of a young woman no matter what might happen next. This happens only once. Poverty, on the other hand, can last a lifetime, Alvarez writes.

The author falls under the glittery spell of the spectacle, and in the hands of such a deft chronicler, the reader will fall under the spell, too.

fdavila@seattletimes.com