For a Mexican girl, her 15^th birthday is an important moment, usually celebrated with a big party. Called a Quinceañera, it usually involves a special Mass in the local church, then a party with the birthday girl duded up in a dress that looks like an 18^th century ballgown. Also required are a bunch of teenage guests, carefully vetted friends and relatives, little kids and babies, cake, food, and the inevitable ear-splitting band or DJ with the volume turned up to 10 or whatever the highest available number on the amplifier might be. Often people go completely nuts and spend a fortune on this party. Not too long ago, we watched from our rooftop (we live in a  working-class neighborhood with chickens running loose in the street and to call the street cobblestoned would be generous indeed) as the house next to ours threw a giant party for a local girl. She arrived at her party in a gown that looked like something out of the opera Der Rosenkavalier, with a feathered headdress. She was suitably delivered in a horse-drawn carriage, which paraded slowly down our impossibly dusty street, avoiding the stray dogs and kids riding around in circles on their bikes. The party went on till the early hours of the morning and we never will get used to the horrible noise these fiestas generate.

Here's what the traditional dresses tend to look like....

When we lived in Mexico City in the fifties, my mother thought the whole idea of a quinceañera was totally barbaric as the assumption was (I suspect that she was in some part correct) that after that milestone the girl was immediately available for marriage and babies. While I am sure that all of that was true in seventeenth century Mexico, as an American teenager I truly never gave any thought whatsoever to having such a party; that was something special for my Mexican pals but the whole deal just didn’t feel right for me. But now that I’ve seen more of what families go through as their precious niña approaches fifteen, I can see what my mother was concerned about. It involves a lot of money and – like big weddings – more of an opportunity to show off than anything else. My American mother did NOT want me having any sort of quinceañera or even the desire for one. In fact, she had begun to worry about how Mexican I was becoming and was concerned about my getting into college in the States. This was just one of a whole complex of issues that led to my family’s eventual return to California. My insistence that “nowadays it’s just a tradition and it hardly means that now that you’re in the 9^th grade you should get married” carried no weight whatsoever.

Sofia, her niece America, and me after her Mass

Although the traditions associated with quinceañera parties have changed quite a bit since then, certain aspects seem to remain ironclad in Mexican culture, and the list of “requirements” can make for a very expensive celebration. Since Sofia’s family works very hard and has few resources, all along the assumption was that she shouldn’t even have any celebration of her fifteenth birthday beyond maybe a family dinner with some pastel (cake). But for the first time in her life, she has a group of girlfriends (some boys too!) in her new school and it seemed like maybe we could do something modest – I offered our house and garden for a small fiesta for her family and a few of her friends. But an aunt in the States sent some money with a note that says “you only turn fifteen once, you should have a nice party”.  So an “evento” place was procured (sort of an outdoor garden you can rent for parties), invitations went out, and the family all agreed to make a bunch of food for the fiesta by themselves.

The whole family pitches in to make a feast for everyone!

My bright liberated-American woman-idea was that they shouldn’t have to shell out for a dress for Sofia which would be worn exactly ONCE, so I forked over my Eileen Fisher stretch velvet floorlength dress, which I thought could be cut down to fit Sofia relatively inexpensively. Only problem was, after ditzing around for two weeks with the date of the party and the accompanying special Mass in the church fast approaching, the ladies at the local alterations shop, having never seen such a dress, turned out to be terrified to cut into the (to them, at least) rare and expensive silk velvet. After endless excuses as to why the dress wasn’t ready, they finally admitted that they were afraid to touch the fabric and and scared of losing me as a client and scared of the whole business, but of course no one told me anything.

Frustrated by the ongoing stalemate, the day before the party, Rosa took Sofia on the bus and went to a larger nearby town to hunt for some sort of a party dress so the poor kid would have something even vaguely reasonable to wear. They found one that was floor length, gauzy white with sparkly things on it, (so far so good for church). Sofia protested that she looked like a bride, which annoyed her, but there were twelve hours to go and desperate times require desperate measures. Alas, the dress was also entirely backless and the padre said “no way are you coming to church in that dress, you have to wear a rebozo to cover yourself up. And make sure your friends cover THEMSELVES up too”.  Hence Sofi “covered up” and in the photos her girlfriends all appear wearing these little black capes provided by the church, since their dresses were (of course) either strapless or at the very least, pretty revealing on the top. As for the mini length of their skirts, I guess the padre just had to give a little since there was no way he was going to get these Mexican teenagers looking like Amish girls. Meantime, I thought Sofia should have something “borrowed” from me for the occasion, since I’m her madrina (godmother). So I put together a pile of jewelry, earrings, two of my best rebozos and a gorgeous enormous French silk scarf for her to borrow and sent it home with Rosa after she had finished cleaning for the day, for Sofia to pick out what she wanted.

Well, none of my American-lady-goes-to-the-opera stuff looked very Mexican and of course now I realize that it was totally out of style for a fifteen-year-old. Plus, Sofia is very independent and I should have figured that ultimately she would do her own thing. She arrived ready for her Mass in the backless dress – and with her hair done up with flowers by her two older sisters, and wearing makeup for the first time, looking gorgeous. Somewhere she found a white nylon crochet rebozo that was much more Mexican-looking than my square meter of Parisian silk. The only thing she used of mine was a two-strand crystal neckace (which was perfect with the dress!).  The day after the party, Rosa was so worried about returning my stuff to me that she refused to get on the bus with it and made her son-in-law bring her in his truck with the loot (all of which is costume jewelry).

So, in the end, pretty much everything I tried to do was completely trampled by the persistence of Mexican culture. After I said “it’s crazy to spend a fortune on a silly party that lasts one day” her family scraped together as much money as they could, and with the support of Rosa’s sister in the States the food, evento place, and the long white dress were procured. They ended up with enough to have their own party for her in their own style – including the horrid DJ Sofia wanted (Rosa kept asking them to turn the music down, and they did for ten seconds, then turned it back up again, of course) so she and her friends could dance. No one could carry on any sort of a conversation over the racket. She wanted a limousine and that, too, she had! The distance from the church to the party place they rented was very short so to make the limousine more worthwhile, I gather, the custom here is that the kids all pile into it and they drive all around several local villages posing for snapshots, waving and carrying on, before finally arriving at the party.

Sofi and her "modest" friends in church

Sofia and Rosa by the limousine

The party in full swing!

Sofia and her cake

Moving to Mexico, one needs a maid. It is just written into the DNA of the culture that most “middle class” or “upper middle class” houses have maids. When I was a kid living in Mexico City in the ‘fifties we had two, an upstairs one and a downstairs one. They lived in a tiny little house in the back where the stone laundry sink was. Their quarters were very basic, to say the least. Our downstairs maid, Rosa, was just a couple of years older than I was, and we got to be pretty good friends talking about boys and clothes and makeup (which my mother disapproved of; she didn’t like me getting to close to the “help”.) The upstairs maid was Cuca. Refugio was her real name and I always wished someone would have named ME Refugio, but nice Jewish girls didn’t get names like that, or at least the ones from Encino like me. Maybe if I’d been Sephardic. Cuca was in her sixties at that point and was the only illiterate person I had ever met (granted, I was only twelve) and it fascinated me how she managed to answer the phone, take messages and navigate in the city.

In any event, landing in Mexico again fifty years later, we still needed a maid. One of our friends had a terrific maid who needed some extra work, so she joined our household, though nowadays most maids don’t live in, unless the house is a pretty big one. Rosa, who comes to clean three days a week, and stays here to guard the house when we are traveling, turned out to be an even better friend to me than the earlier Rosa had been. She is one of the most intuitive and sensitive women I’ve ever met. Now in her late forties, she was forced to drop out of school in the second grade because “girls don’t need to go to school” and because her family was so poor they couldn’t afford shoes and school supplies, let alone uniforms and the modest fees the Mexican primary schools require. She somehow taught herself to read and write and though she is more than bright enough to have done any number of things, her lot was to clean houses. She does this with dignity and grace and we have become very fond of her over the years.

Sofia (2009, age 13) and Rosa

Rosa of course got married way too young. She had a male child who died, but her other three daughters survived: Mireya, Gaby, and the baby, Sofia. Rosa had to endure quite a bit of rejection from her husband and his family because she never produced another boy. She couldn’t really move out, but she did manage to have as little to do with her husband as possible and swore to herself that if nothing else, she would raise her three girls without violence. She decided she would never, under any circumstances, hit them, and she never has. The two older girls now have children of their own (more on them later!) But when I got to know the youngest child, Sofia, she told me that all she wanted to do was study, that she didn’t want to be dragged down with babies like the others. She was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to go to secundaria (middle school) when the time came, because her mom was “just a maid” and even though she was at the top of her class and her school, she was not certain that she would be able to continue.

Me, Sofia and Arnold at her Primary School Graduation

Sofia's Graduating Class - Primary School

Of course, Sofia was smart enough to come to me! (She probably knew a sucker when she saw one). I told her that if she continued to keep her grades up, Arnold and I would help her stay in school and we’d help her go as far as she wanted. We began to help with tuition, uniforms, books, and other expenses through one of the local charities that exists as a go-between to help expats who want to provide that sort of assistance to deserving kids in the local public schools. That arrangement went on for a couple of years, and Sofia continued to do well academically, but we could see that she was utterly alone, without any friends, and I suspected underneath it all, she was pretty depressed. The girls were all pairing up with boys and the pressure was on her to find a “novio” pretty soon. She hated the whole business.

I felt that the time might be coming to yank her out of there and try to get her into a better school where she would meet kids from families who expected their children not only to finish high school, but to go on to college, since while she couldn’t fully articulate it, I knew that was what she wanted for herself as well. I wangled a meeting with the headmaster of one of the good private schools here, and showed up with Sofi’s grades, her “reconocimientos” (awards) and helped Rosa fill out an application for a scholarship. Sofia was accepted and given a 50% scholarship – we and other friends are making up the difference. Since she has been at the new school, she has been a whole new kid. For the first time in her life, she has friends – gobs of them, and a real social life. She loves it there.

We are about to get her first set of grades since she made the transfer – we’ll see soon how tough the coursework has been for her and how difficult the academic adjustment has been. But it has been fun to see her blossom into a regular old teenager, complete with a “crowd” of girls to hang out with, occasional bouts of predictable moodiness, and a keen desire to have the coolest clothes she can possibly scrounge together. Her new friends, most of whom come from far wealthier families, have been very kind to her and welcomed her into her new “salon” (class) with open arms. She was terrified of course, and so was Rosa, that it would be hard for her to make that social leap. Rosa and Sofia share a bed in Rosa’s tiny house; all Sofia wants is a bed and a room of her own someday. At least planning to go on to college, she may have half a chance of actually getting one.

Going back to the States is always so complicated….we get off the plane, we readjust to everyone speaking English, we hit the stores the second we unpack to begin stocking up on whatever we are missing. We dive into the retail offerings like children going after whatever a smashed piñata has scattered to the ground; then when we raise our heads from the bins and racks and go outside to whichever street it is, we marvel at the cleanliness and orderliness of it all…no plastic bags and empty bottles scattered around, no dead dogs by the side of the road, no dusty garbage heaps covered only by the weeds the current rainy season has so generously helped to cover.

We see family and friends and catch up on everything and wish, for a moment, that our lives had been different; that we had gone to the right schools and gotten the right degrees and had a life that would have enabled us to stay in our Ancestral Homeland with comfortable retirement funds and the luxury of living in one of these great cities without having to work and be in front of a desk every day despite blizzards or flu or rain or just not feeling like it that day. But our lives turned out to be vastly, vastly different. Who knows why?  There are hints, of course. Firstly that I had lived in Mexico as a kid, and loved it here. Did NOT want to come back to the U.S., having no interest in being an American teenager. I knew that any attempt short, dark, chubby ME would make at fitting in to a life where the kids were pert, blond, long-limbed and not particularly interested in listening to Beethoven or opera at age 14 was going to be a colossal failure. And in that, despite my youth, I was correct.

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So for many reasons my destiny was to keep moving; away from New Haven, where I was born (and where one branch of my family still lives), to Los Angeles as an infant with my parents; then away from there to college in Boston; then away from there to San Francisco to put my then-husband through graduate school and begin a range of challenging – and rather interesting – bunch of varied jobs doing all sorts of things. We left Oakland for Santa Fe. And fifteen years into our Santa Fe life it occurred to us that the reason we had liked it so much was that it was about as close as you could get to living in a foreign country and not leaving the U.S. That, of course, begged the question “well, why not GO to a foreign country, then?” We made trips to Italy, to Germany, to France, and imagined ourselves living in all the cities where we rented apartments for a week or two. But Mexico was the most practical – my parents were both alive and needed constant attention and monitoring of their care back in Santa Fe; I still had to work enough to help bring in some income, and quarterly trips back to the U.S. were mandatory, at least for a while.

Thus it was that in 2006 we sold our house in Santa Fe, packed up our stuff and the cats, and headed south to see what Mexico could offer us in the way of a new life – willing to trade off the conveniences of our American life for the freedom of ditching the day jobs, the mortgage, the car payment, the stress.

So far, the tradeoff has been a good one.

Carnaval parade, February 2009

October 12, 2011 – Plane landed, and the bus takes us to Customs as usual. Was prepared for the usual “we are back in this crazy place, maybe we should have stayed in the States, it is so nice and clean and orderly there” feelings I always have when we come back from a trip. But was immediately distracted from all that by brand new desks for the customs agents and spiffy new uniforms for the porters that are white mariachi shirts and traditional red bow ties! They look terrific, handsome and eager to help. Got outside looking for Luis to take us home but he wasn’t there, but found his brother Miguel, assigned to bring us home. With him was his five-year old son Ivan (more often than not, Mexico has Bring Your Child To Work Day) who delighted us the whole way home by telling us how in kindergarten he has now learned to count forward AND backward from zero to twenty, how he has learned his colors and one-two-three-four-five in English, and how he has a new game which involves buying and selling toy cars and he has to learn the “marcas” of every single car on the road in order to play it. So it was “that’s a Ford!” “That’s a Chevy!” all the way home. His father said “Hijo, fasten your seat belt and then count from twenty to zero backwards for the Señor and the Señora”. This Ivan did, several times.

We got home, Rosa opened the gate when we rang, and the first sound I heard (other than Reina barking) was the splashing of our fountain. She threw her arms around us and insisted on dragging the suitcases into the house across the courtyard, through the pathway littered with the fallen orange blossoms of our galeana tree.. Maybe this isn’t so bad after all, I thought.