At the annual Fiestas Patrias celebrating Mexico's independence from Spain, Brenda Martinez carries the Mexican flag past South Park's L&W Apartments. Martinez is an original member of La Voz del Pueblo, a mariachi band at Chief Sealth High School.

Sure, it's a big deal, this traditional coming-of-age ceremony in a Latino community trying to find its way in this neglected Seattle neighborhood. But too much fanfare; too much aggravation.

Then she remembers what her aunts told her: Nayely, your father would have liked it.

Well, yeah, but now, less than two weeks from the big day, hardly anyone, not even her brother or honorary escort, is here to practice the regal dance that is the grand finale of the whole affair.

It figures.

Nayely (Nah-YEH-lee), a petite, lightly freckled sophomore at Seattle's Chief Sealth High, always seems to be left holding the reins. She's head of the house when her mom works odd hours at the produce warehouse, she helps the neighbor kids with their studies, and last year, when a busted sewer pipe flooded their flimsy, two-story apartment building in South Park, she played translator for firefighters evacuating the mostly Spanish-speaking residents.
 

In the 15 units at the L&W, more than 30 children are under age 10, and most of them are bilingual. From left to right in the courtyard: José Estrada, 6, Jesus Verduzco, 8, and Rafael Franco, 6.

"The water came into the kitchen," she recalls. "It was very bad colors."

"It was fun," says kid sister Dália, recalling their overnight stay in a community-center shelter. "We were jumping on the beds."

Nayely looks at the clock: 7:30 at night, and still some of the girls, and all of the guys, are missing, a half-hour late.

The often-lavish quinceañera (keen-say-ah-NYAY-rah), from quince años, meaning 15 years, is the rite of passage for traditional Mexican girls, the biggest thing next to a wedding. So despite her reservations and the hassle of all those rehearsals, here she is, ready to take the next step.

Seattle's Latino population — mostly of Mexican origin — is coming of age, too. The 2000 U.S. Census confirmed what many had long perceived — that the number of Latinos living in King County had quietly surpassed the number living in Yakima County, whose farming community is more linked with Latino immigration.

This newer, more urban community is coming to maturity in fits and starts — a small, long-established pool of folks flooded over time with waves of migrant workers from the Southwest, then great rushes of successful restaurateurs — think Azteca, Torero's, Las Margaritas and so on — from the town of Cuautla in Jalisco. Recently have come larger streams of more seasoned immigrants: They gave life a whirl in places like Texas or California first, but heard things were better here.
 

	The courtyard at the L&W is a natural meeting area for tenants. The problem this day is the frozen and cracked pipes under the building. Sewage is backing up into the apartments, and until the pipes are repaired the residents will need to evacuate to a nearby community center.

Of course, a number of U.S.-born Latino professionals and blue-collar workers have, like others, made Seattle one of the nation's more popular places. But the Spanish-speakers are the ones most altering the city.

Fits and starts: This is how it happens. Churches, newspapers, soccer leagues. Then, suddenly, the landscape has changed and a new community is born.

Oh, there's the door again.

Nayely gets up to answer it in T-shirt and whitewashed jeans. One by one, more high-schoolers arrive, surnames like Garcia, Franco, Ramirez, Aguirre.

At 8 o'clock, the gathered finally shift down the street to a nearby basketball court where they'll practice a three-tune routine arranged by choreographer-hopeful Fernando Soto. A few minutes pass and, at last, there's Nayely's brother Alecxix ("Alexis") and her chambelán de honor, Pedro Piñeda, sagging down the alley in droopy pants and freshly mowed hair.

Winds pick up under cloudy skies, and a boombox crackles "The Blue Danube" as loudly as it can. Soto, a landscaper by trade, positions Nayely and Pedro on one end, the rest on the other. Eventually they come together in a rock-step kaleidoscope of revolving partners and spinning circles, oleander branches subbing for roses, high-tops for dress shoes.
 

Marco Fernandez hangs the curtains while his mother is at work. They've painted the walls in her favorite color of green.
While the courtyard lacks any sort of playground equipment, that doesn't stop the kids from finding ways to have fun.

A steady rain begins to fall and Soto covers the sopping stereo with a towel as they practice, over and over again, despite the downpour. The big finish: Nayely squeals as she's lifted atop strong shoulders into the rain. Despite the obstacles, she does what she has to do. Here is life in America as it revolves around one Mexican household in an increasingly Mexican neighborhood, in an apartment complex whose makeup illustrates Seattle's changing character and the blending of many worlds — smoothly, so far — into one.

YOU PROBABLY wouldn't notice South Park's L&W apartment complex if you passed it, not even on a clear day. Then again, you probably wouldn't pass it: Pitched between half-mile-apart entrances to Highway 509 north and south, it's one of several anonymous houses and apartment structures along Cloverdale Avenue where the nearest corporate franchises — besides a Texaco station — are miles away.

It could be any apartment building catering to those just scraping by, a place of temperamental appliances and cheap pebbled siding. A modest driveway suffers the indignity of a car with a habitually broken rear window; little boys dart and tumble through the grass. Frequently, a graffiti-marked "For Rent" sign beckons from a pinch of iron fence around the building's ground-level decks.

Then the elote car sidles up to the curb and tells you this is South Park. The red clunker of an Oldsmobile spits out a guy who heads for the L&W's interior courtyard, announcing fresh corn on the cob as he goes. "¡Elotes!" he calls out. "¡Elotes!" Outside, his female companion pops the car trunk, revealing a bounty submerged in a bin of hot water, canisters of mayonnaise and shredded cheese nearby. Yours for $1.50 apiece.

Gardener Enrique Aguilar comes out to take a look. Not today, he nods, pants stained grass-green at the shins. He stoops to pick up a scrap of trash on the sidewalk.

Enrique and his wife Norma, Mexico City natives, are the unofficial godparents of the building, keeping watch over the kids who play in its nooks and shadows. The easygoing Enrique motions toward a nearby few as the elote car heads for hungrier pastures: "He don't have a father," he says of one. Of another: "He don't, either." Many couples who come here separate, he says, unable to weather economic hardship.

The apartments wrap around a dim, cramped courtyard where a thin tree pokes from a scrawny patch of soil. Yet it's often the hub of activity, this building's public square, neighborly thoroughfare, concrete playground, where stairway railings double as park benches and building co-manager Berenice Aguilera often tidies up with her broom.
 

	Missing his mother in Mexico, Josué Morales shares a big hug and a few tears with his aunt, Ana Garcia, after his band serenades them outside the family's restaurant, Tortas Tropical, for Mother's Day. At left is Morales' grandmother, Ana Maria Garcia. In Mexico, Mother's Day is always observed on May 10.

She and husband Samuel arrived three years ago from Texas. He works two jobs — one as a painter at a waterski factory, another as chef in a Tukwila casino — to keep up with rent. (A one-bedroom here goes for about $550, residents say.) Virtually everyone in the place is Mexican.

To understand how much the area has changed, take the community of White Center, which abuts South Park and has a population large enough for the census people to analyze statistically. The 2000 population of 20,975 has barely budged in the past 20 years, but in that time the community's complexion changed dramatically — its minority share quadrupling to nearly half. Since 1990 alone, the number of Latinos here more than doubled to nearly 12 percent. In South Park, the number more than tripled to 1,379 in a population of only 3,717.

"It's been a big turnaround," says Carlos Jimenez, whose advertising business in White Center is one of an estimated 1,000 Latino-run enterprises serving western Washington. Jobs, schools have barely kept pace. "We took the city by surprise."

He and others say better wages here outweigh higher rents. "There's much more work here," Berenice Aguilera says. "You can live a little better."
 

"You feel special," says Alecxix Fernandez of being in a mariachi band. "The family used to sing at night. I wanted to know the same songs that they sang."

Economics brought Nayely Fernandez and her family to the U.S., but it was tragedy that brought them to Seattle. Natives of Las Trojes, Jalisco, a ranching community outside Guadalajara, they came to Madera, Calif., near Fresno, in 1996. Her construction-worker father, Francisco, had family there. Surrounded by classmates who spoke no Spanish, Nayely made herself learn English within nine months. "I needed to," she says. "I felt left out. I had to do something or I would be stuck there."

Weekends were spent riding horses and cooking carne asada. Then, one evening while she was out practicing for a friend's quinceañera, her father's best friend shot and killed Francisco in an argument.

Nayely's mother Eva, suddenly single with five kids, decided to join family in the Northwest, and she and her relatives now occupy four of the L&W's 15 units. The neighborhood itself is pockmarked with drugs and occasional gunfire, but just the same, Nayely likes the urban life, and when she needs groceries or a phone card, Latino-run markets and dollar stores are just an eight-block walk away.

Oh, there's that door again.

One of her brother's friends, looking for Alecxix, who's not home. She returns to watching Dália, 9, and Emilio, 6, in the bright living room where family photos dot the walls and shelves. In the biggest one of all, across from the dining room where they honor October's Day of the Dead with annual altars of flowers and food for their lost father, is Francisco Fernandez, flanked by his children and wearing a gaze so heavy you're almost glad the weight of the world behind it has been lifted from his shoulders.
 

			Nayely Fernandez is lifted by Alfredo Enciso, left, and her brother Alecxix as they rehearse the dance for her quinceañera.

CHING-CHING-CHING-CHING — no, not right. Ching-ching. Yes, much better. Woeful eyes locked in serious concentration, 16-year-old Alecxix Fernandez readies his stringed vihuela, sleeve rolled above his forearm as he strums. Gradually, his mariachi band comes to life amid a squawking of trumpets, the sliding meow of violins.

It's Friday, May 10, and this cameo at Seattle's Rainier Cultural Center is just the prelude to a long night. May 10 is always Mother's Day in Mexico, so it's payback time, time for these youngsters to say thanks to the generation that, for many of them, made life in America possible.

Two years ago, Carlos Jimenez helped Sealth launch a mariachi music class to promote Mexican culture and academic achievement among Latino students dispirited by their immigration experience. More than 5,000 of the Seattle School District's 47,000 students are Latino, and Sealth, which serves Southwest Seattle, has long been a stronghold of that growth.

"We gotta go!" they call as Jimenez spreads the word, looking for stragglers. "Where's Josué?" he asks, meaning 17-year-old Josué Morales, the only guy who knows all the songs. Hair dyed pea green, Josué hurries out and into the van, sheepishly holding a plate of food.
 

Young friends and relatives fall into step, focused on memorizing the specially choreographed dance in time for Nayely's quinceañera. Pedro Piñeda, the chambelán de honor, leads the marching couples in a parking lot off the alley behind the L&W Apartments.
Emilio, 6, wakes from a nap to find he's next to the dress his sister Nayely will wear for her quinceañera. She's taken it out of the plastic wrap to show her girlfriends, arriving soon for the practice.

Even as they assimilate, many Mexican-born students embrace ties to the Old World, including the mariachi, a hackneyed south-of-the-border icon here but a position of prestige back home. Tonight's plan is to surprise and serenade their mothers at home.

The caravan trundles across the 16th Street bridge and into the heart of South Park, pulling over around the corner from the home of 16-year-old vihuela player Robert Hernandez. Shh-shh, comes the admonition as they pile out in customary charro outfits with silver botonadura, ornamental fittings lining their costumes. Boots clumping through dirt, as quiet as a troop of high-school mariachis can be. Moving into front-yard formation. "¡Trompetas!" Jimenez says. "You guys ready?"

A quick knock on the door, and a woman appears carrying a swaddled baby: Robert's mother and 18-day-old sister. A signal from Jimenez, and they launch into the celebratory standard, "Las Mañanitas," as neighbors emerge onto porches to see.

The mariachis move inside, overwhelming the tiny living room. Robert's mother listens with clenched lips and moistening eyes, looking up long enough to share a smile with her son. After the third and final song, she steps up and kisses him on the cheek. Then, one by one, the mariachis step up to embrace her.

"Happy Mother's Day, Señora," Jimenez says as the group moves on. "Have a good one."

And so it goes even as evening falls, mariachi commandos with botonadura jangling like pocket change as they creep past working-class homes and project housing, moms overcome with emotion and neighbors applauding for these invading armies of brass and string.

Though they're mostly out of tune and synch, the high-schoolers' enthusiasm never dampens. Yes, they could've invited all the moms to come hear them in some soul-less auditorium, but this is personal, a way to say: Here's what I've been doing with the time you've given me. "Usually Latino parents are really strict," Jimenez says. "They want their kids to be involved in something positive . . . In the old times, a mariachi goes off to college, gets a master's degree. It's a special talent. Most parents never dreamed their kids would be part of a mariachi group."

As daylight fades, they pull into a gravel lot across from a restaurant called Tortas Tropical. With green-haired Josue's mother still in Mexico, they'll instead serenade his aunt and grandmother, who work here at the family business. They gather outside in flashy black while a trio of African-American girls, fellow Sealth students who live nearby, mocks them in indelicate high-school fashion. Comments are traded, lines drawn.
 

	Nayely dances with her father's oldest brother, José Luís Fernandez of San Jose, Calif. Nayely's father, who was killed by a friend during an argument, was the youngest of four brothers. Speeches and tributes to her coming-of-age also honor her father's memory.

Look at those ratty pants.

Oh, that's so cute.

That Mexican girl said something.

What'd she say?

Weathering the distraction, the band breaks into song as the two small women appear. By set's end, they're as tearful as their young relative, who embraces his aunt, then his grandma, for a long, long time, an unbridled show of emotion that is altogether unassailable.

At last, at 10 p.m., they descend upon the L&W Apartments, gathering in the dark, quiet courtyard as Eva Fernandez appears at the door, just home from the night shift. Nayely appears beside her. The trumpets blurt in unison, flushing a spooked cat down the skinny tree nearby and prompting a mezzanine of kids making childhood memories on second-floor railings.

Don't get the wrong idea: Few plan to stay at the L&W forever. It's a great front-row seat for camcorder-armed parents and kids at September's annual Fiestas Patrias parade, but the truth is that most people who live here hope to move up and out before long.
 

During Mass, Nayely pauses to pray before a statue of Mary at Holy Family Catholic Church.
Nayely is one among four young women having Mass for their quinceañeras at Holy Family. The church decided to start consolidating quinceañera ceremonies when they began to crowd out weddings on Saturdays.
It's a proud day not only for Nayely but for her family, including her grandmother, Catalina Fernandez, 76.

"If you speak Spanish with everybody, you will never speak English better," says Norma Aguilar. "How will I help my child in school?"

Nayely likes being surrounded by so many reminders of her native country — "Sometimes I feel like it's my own little Mexico here," she says — but at the same time feels stifled by her neighborhood's economic and criminal shortcomings. The complex itself has changed with turnover — the community isn't as tight as it once was, and the informal building association that once held periodic courtyard pow wows no longer exists. "It's not the same anymore."

But if the gray skies of Seattle were hard for her to stomach at first, the area's grown on her. "I think I'm gonna stay here," Nayely says. "When I came here. . ." She shakes her head. "But as time passed, I'm like, 'Yeah, this is my barrio.' "

AS AUGUST 17 approached, the idea of a quinceañera started to grow on Nayely, too. She found herself anxious to find just the right silver-white dress, get her nails done and send 100 invitations from here to Southern California. "I'm getting a little nervous," she said a few days before the event after the limousine outfit told her it wasn't sure a car would be available after all. "But my friend used that company for her quinceañera," she said hopefully.

On the big day, Nayely's is one of four quinceañera celebrations held simultaneously at West Seattle's Holy Family Catholic Church. The parish introduced its first Spanish-language Mass a few years ago and now holds four a week to accommodate the rising number of Mexican, Peruvian and Salvadoran members. But when quinceañeras started squeezing weddings from the Saturday schedule, Holy Family decided it was time to consolidate its coming-of-age ceremonies.

The limo has come through after all. The driver thinks Nayely and Pedro have gotten married. At the reception, her grandma directs an operation churning out enchiladas and more for 200 people — including the L&W's Aguilars and Aguileras, plus family who drove 18 straight hours from California to be here. Rincon, the band whose members hail from the same speck-sized towns as the Fernandez family — Las Trojes or nearby Potrerillos, Jalisco — blasts brass at jet-airliner decibels.

Along the dance hall wall, the California-rancher contingent stands in pointy-toed boots and wide-brimmed hats. Nayely, taking a break in her flowing skirt, lets one of them flip open a soda-can pop-top for her to protect her manicured nails. "Five more years," 10-year-old cousin Cindy Fernandez says dreamily, "and I'll be Naye, with that dress on."

Coming of age isn't easy, but circumstances sometimes demand it. Nayely and the others sneak in one last practice outside for the benefit of two California participants who've just arrived, their parking-lot pageantry interrupted by her wrathful grandma who appears, dress spotted with enchilada sauce, to herd them back inside. Everybody's wondering where you are.

With everyone rounded up, it's time for the big dance. Choreographer Soto does frantic last-minute repositioning. Nayely's hands join in a final prayer. But so much for worry: Under the soft light of the dance hall, it all looks wondrously arranged — elegant teenaged girls spinning and sailing into the arms of tuxedoed boys, nervous smiles turning to relief as "The Blue Danube" crackles from the sound system.

Nayely twirls and waltzes under upraised roses, collecting them as she goes. A crescendo, then applause, as she's lifted atop Alecxix's and Pedro's shoulders. Her moment, her time to shine. For both of us, Dad. Savoring each flash of the cameras, she holds the flowers to her heart and blows a starlet's kiss to what lies ahead, whatever that may be.