I’ve had the time of my life: Celebrating Latine/x girlhoods through quinceañeras

Gomez-Perez, Stephanie

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132878 Copy

Description

Title

I’ve had the time of my life: Celebrating Latine/x girlhoods through quinceañeras

Author(s)

Gomez-Perez, Stephanie

Issue Date

2023

Keyword(s)

Institute of Communications Research

Abstract

At the Spurlock Museum last fall, I was part of a team that curated a special exhibition titled “Quinceañeras: Celebration, Joy, and Ethnic Pride.” Quinceañeras offer Latine/x teens a chance to celebrate the joy of adolescence as they undergo body changes and discover who they are. As the quinceañera is an engagement between culture and community, the celebrated teen can envision their fifteenth birthday as a small get-together with close family, a vacation, a gift, or a festive party as colorful as their personality.Combining artifacts from current and former quinceañeras around the U.S. with popular culture representations, our team found that quinceañeras have intergenerationally offered U.S. Latine/x communities an opportunity to joyfully (re)unite and celebrate in community while living in a society that often marginalizes diasporic Latin American descendants. Co-creating this exhibit illuminated my work on spectral Latinidades in contemporary media, where tropes of Latine/x girlhoods are expanded and exploded. As well, working with the Spurlock allowed me to engage with a public of visitors who learned about quinceañeras, guests who reminisced on their own celebrations, and young students who asked questions about the exhibit out of curiosity about their own burgeoning girlhoods.

Type of Resource

• Text
• Image

Language

eng

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132878

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Stephanie Gomez-Perez

Owning Collections