Part IV: The Caribbean
Chapter 13: Quinceañeras: Girls’ Coming-of-Age Parties in Contemporary Havana, Cuba
Heidi Härkönen
In this chapter, the author explores the phenomenon of flamboyant girls’ fifteenth birthday parties (quinceañeras) as a gender–specific ritual. The author discusses the ways that this life–cycle ritual celebrates the girl’s entry into sexual adulthood, portrays her as an object of heterosexual desire, while simultaneously granting the girls ritual and exotic agency. The author concludes that contemporary quinceañera rituals also reflect the island’s recent political and economic turn toward a more capitalist society and displays the growing racialized and gendered inequalities on the island.
- Describe how rituals can reproduce gender as a socially significant category of differentiation.
- Evaluate how global and state-level historical processes and politics shape local gendered ritual practices.
- Articulate how questions of gendered power and agency are embedded in ritual practices.
When Habanera (Havana resident) girls turn fifteen, their birthday is usually celebrated with a lavish fiesta de los quince años that in its most elaborate form includes a dance party with hundreds of guests and food, drink, and entertainment. The festivities typically include the girl dressing up in puffy dresses imitating eighteenth-century European court fashions and dancing a waltz with a male relative in front of her kin, friends, and neighbors. Boys’ fifteenth birthdays are not celebrated in a similarly grandiose way, making the quince a highly gender specific ritual.
A central part of the ritual consists of the photos taken by a professional photographer where the girl poses in diverse outfits ranging from the latest fashion gear to mermaid costumes. Although the photos often portray the quinceañera as a sensual seductress, the rituals’ meanings are more complex than just presenting the girl as a passive sexual object. In Havana, the quince forms a markedly women’s ritual, highlighting simultaneously the girl’s entry into young adulthood in her kin group and in the process, gaining gendered “erotic agency,” which Holly Wardlow (2006, 232) defines as “the power and delight of being desired.”
Although quinceañeras are celebrated across the Americas, I first encountered the ritual when I was in Havana conducting ethnographic research for my master’s thesis in 2003–2004 (Härkönen 2005). My initial focus was to explore the Catholic confirmation ritual, but I had trouble locating Catholic Cubans who would have undergone confirmation. Although Cuba is historically a Catholic country, its many years as a socialist, officially atheist, society have greatly diminished the role of the Catholic Church on the island. However, Habanera women enthusiastically showed me girls’ quince photos. And as I began to realize how important the ritual was, I shifted my focus to the quince. The quince was a topic that I as a young woman at the time of my initial, r