The celebration of quince marks the girl’s “moment of beauty” and reaching of sexual maturity. The statements that girls gave on how quince changed their lives emphasised the ritual’s role as marking a transition “from childhood to adolescence.” Girls stated that “starting from then, you start to see life differently” and they also said that their bodily appearance changed: they were allowed to use (more) makeup and cut their hair. Quince thereby entails an expectation of the girl’s transformation. This was pointed out particularly clearly when someone failed in this, with frowning comments from my informants: “She still looks like a child!”
Many girls said that after the celebration of their quince, they had more freedom and their parents allowed them to stay out late at night, their parents
56 There is some degree of racialised difference in the ritual praxis in the sense that the magnitude of quince parties tends to reflect more general income differences and thereby the most lavish parties are often organised by girls of lighter skin colours because their families have more money available for the party. However, this is not a clear-cut distinction and individual situations may vary.
trusted them more than before. This life stage coincides with adolescents’
finishing school and many youngsters move to a boarding school away from their parents to continue their studies in high school or in professional education. This often adds to their sexual freedom (Hamilton 2012: 82).
FIG. 6: A QUINCEAÑERA POSING IN A PHOTO SHOOT
Niurka, a mother who had recently celebrated her daughter’s quince, reflected on the subject:
They feel themselves a little like adults, they look different. (...) They know that already at 15, [it is] when they start having a boyfriend and all these things… A little more responsibility is on her because one already has to start telling her that she has to take care [of herself] and all the things that may happen to her starting from then. (…) Everybody starts to see her as a bigger person; he, who did not see her as… a woman, starts to eye her up because she is 15 and he starts to see her differently; men start to see her differently. But for this we prepare the girls before their quince party (…), they must become more responsible. You always tell them that I’m sorry for what happens to her, but the one who’s going to be more sorry for it, is she herself, because she has to answer for what happens to her.
Here Niurka refers vaguely to the possibility of a pregnancy that is something
that girls have to take into notice at the age of 15.57 Thus, increased liberties are combined with more responsibility as a more autonomous and independent moral person.
During the party, the quinceañera is frequently referred to as a “beautiful flower” and the venue of the fiesta is usually decorated with abundant flowers.
Moreover, in the photos, quinceañeras frequently pose amongst flowers and with flowers all over their body, often nude. Sunflowers are the most common flowers because by their religious significance they connect with the Santería orisha Ochún, a beautiful, highly feminine mulata, the goddess of sexuality, sensuality, and love. Flowers are a very feminine symbol and they are given to women by men (to give a man a flower would be to insinuate that he is homosexual). The use of flowers in the ritual – sunflowers in particular – emphasises the girl’s femininity and sexuality, stressing her position as a gendered, sexually mature ‘almost’-adult.58
Sexual symbolism is emphasised throughout the ritual and can be seen in the outfits, the nude-photographs, and the performances that take place in quince parties. During the photo session, a girl’s female relatives often urge her to show more skin and sometimes quinceañeras are photographed in lingerie next to a stripper’s pole. In Yolanda’s party the choreography of the dance show emphasised female agency and sexuality: girls danced alone on the stage gyrating their hips whilst the song in the background stated “Women!
Watch your man’s body and dance!” (Mujeres! Ve al cuerpo de tu hombre y baila!). After this, boys came to the dance floor, kneeled down and the girls sat on their back while a song titled “Love without clothes” (Amor sin ropa) started to play.
Thus, the girls’ role on the dance floor was one of a male-objectifying sexual dominatrix. Sometimes this stress on female power/agency is made very explicit in the ritual: for example, Maribel was photographed as a ‘girl power’
-type superhero with a sword in her hand.
I connect this emphasis on autonomous female sexuality in the ritual to the fact that quince marks the girls’ transition into sexual adulthood. This is further stressed by the fact that traditionally the meaning of a quince fiesta is to mark the moment when a girl is officially allowed to have a boyfriend and in the process, sexual relations.59 In the Caribbean, full adulthood means participation in sexual interaction and procreation (Smith 1996d: 205). The Cuban quince ritual represents female sexuality in a very different light than,
57 Although children as such are welcomed, they do interfere with a young girl’s studies and place a considerable strain on her economically if there is little guarantee of the father’s participation (see also Hamilton 2012: 96-116).
58 Not yet fully adult, for parenthood is needed for this.
59 This does not mean that all parents allow girls to have sexual relations at the age of 15 or that all parents prohibit sexual relations for girls who are under 15 years old. However, see also Hamilton, whose several female informants stated that they started to have sexual relations at the age of 15 (2012: 98-99).
for example, the more virginity-stressing quinceañera ritual in some other parts of Latin America (see Napolitano 1997: 284-288 on Mexico; Davalos 2003: 302-305 on Mexican immigrants in the US).60 Quince’s ritual imagery represents the girl as an ultra-feminine sexualised seductress, thus underlining the ritual’s position as marking gender difference in Cuban society in a fundamental way.
In the performances of the quince ritual, the girl’s sexuality is not directed towards one single man who would represent her future husband, but rather towards men in general, emphasising her position as an independent, yet heterosexually-oriented seductress. The purpose of the ritual is not to prepare the girl for marriage, but for sexual life and via this, potentially to reproduction and motherhood.61 None of my informants conceptualised quince as a ritual for the purpose of ‘catching a husband.’ This often became evident within a year or two of the ritual, as quite a few of my young informants tended to have a baby rather than a husband in their arms. Motherhood does not require marriage in the Caribbean and the making of a girl into a fully gendered, heterosexual adult woman is more important than her joining a man in marriage.
Cubans are surprisingly willing to spend their hard-earned money on girls’
15th birthday celebrations – much more so than on weddings.62 When talking about weddings, people often complained about the price of the party and claimed cost as a major contributing factor for not getting married themselves, but when it came to quince, women especially were prepared to save for years in order to organise an over-the-top celebration. Youmara, a Cuban sociologist observed: “The parties now can cost up to 20,000 Cuban pesos [about 870 USD], it’s the party of the parents, of the grandmother, they are parties to show off;
‘the more I have the more I value’. There are families that lose [i.e. sell] their most important domestic equipment in order to make a party for a day to their daughter for her quince. It is more important to the mother than to the girl.”
60 In her discussion on nineteenth-century Cuba, Martinez-Alier states that virginity (before legal marriage) was highly valued and that it still continued to be of great importance in 1969, when she conducted fieldwork in Cuba (1974:
141). Rosendahl (1997: 53, 67) similarly mentions that virginity and chastity are important to women (before entering consensual unions) in her ethnography on 1980s Eastern Cuba (see also Hamilton 2012: 25, 98-100). Since virginity had no value whatsoever amongst my informants (it was a non-topic) there seems to have been either a significant change in this regard since the 1980s or there are great differences between Havana and more rural parts of Cuba (see also Lumsden 1996: 22). However, since also those of my informants who were born in the late 1960s and early 1970s said there was no problem with them starting to have sexual relations around the age of 15, this suggests that virginity did not play a significant role before the Special Period either, at least in Havana. In the larger context of Caribbean kinship and gender relations, disregard for virginity is not surprising (e.g. Smith 1996c).
61 In this sense, quince’s portrayal of the girl reflects the idea of “independent production” discussed in Chapter 3.
62 This marks a difference in the position of weddings taking place in Cuba and many other parts of the Caribbean because traditionally weddings have been depicted by researchers as the ostentatious ritual representing the marrying couple’s high class position in the English-speaking Caribbean (see Clarke 1974: 74-76; Smith 1996a: 149).