Ultimate fiesta

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:22:00 +0000

At the Quinceañera Expo at the Airport Convention Center in San Antonio, little girls are walking around with tiaras in their hair, oohing and aahing the fancy dresses, the pink balloons, the wedding-cake-size cakes, the last dolls encased in plastic, the fluffy pillows with straps for securing the heels in case the page trips as he bears them to the altar to be blessed by the priest.

At a cordoned-off area at the rear of the hall, Victoria Acosta, a fourteen-year old local pop sensation, is singing into a microphone as she dances and gestures with her free hand. "Crazy, crazy, crazy, I think the world's gone crazy!" Her next song, "Once Upon A Time," is dedicated to "all of you out there who have had your hearts broken." "All of you out there" is a semi-circle of pudgy pre-teens sitting on the floor, mesmerized by the slender, glamorous Victoria with her long mascara'd lashes, her glittery eye shadow, her slinky black outfit and sparkly silver tie. "You bet I'm going to have a quince," she tells me during a break between songs, although I don't see why. She seems to have already made her passage into womanhood quite successfully.

How the Alvarez girl found her magic

Mon, 10 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Reading was not an activity that was encouraged in my family, certainly not for girls or even for boys. In fact, as a child, I only knew two readers. One reader was my cousin Juan Tomas, who not only loved to read but as a teenager began to write poetry. This affliction was blamed on the fact that, el pobrecito, he had been sent to boarding school in Germany when he was 9. His father had meant to make a man out of him and instead he came back a reader. "Se va a enfermar," my grandmother would say, shaking her head every time she found Juan Tomas sitting in a chair, reading a book. "He's going to get sick." It just wasn't healthy to enjoy such a solitary, sedentary activity in a culture that prized social interaction and considered cock fighting, rum drinking, and womanizing as normal activities for healthy young men.

The other reader I knew was my maiden aunt Titi, who was 26 and unmarried. Una jamona, an old maid. !Pero cómo no! my grandmother scolded. But of course! Who would want a woman who was a reader for a companion?

Salon.com > Julia Alvarez

Ultimate fiesta

How the Alvarez girl found her magic