Latinas reinvent the quinceañera......

With acclaimed novelist and poet Julia Álvarez arriving in So Cal today, we caught up with her to ask about "Once Upon a Quinceañera," her second work of nonfiction, a project she almost turned down.

When her publisher first pitched the idea of writing about this coming-of age ritual imported from Latin America, Álvarez says she told them, "You’ve got to be kidding! I never even had a quinceañera. I don’t know anything about them."

But after seeing a documentary on the topic, it dawned on her that these increasingly elaborate — and expensive — celebrations for Latinas on the occasion of their 15th birthday made "the perfect lens to look at this thing we are creating here in this country, this Latino cultural identity.

"We're Mexicans, Dominicans, El Salvadorans, Panamanians," said Álvarez, herself a native of the Dominican Republic. "But we’re creating this amalgam culture, inventing it as we go along, picking up things from the mainstream American culture and weaving it into our own."

These rites of passage, in which a ball-gown-clad girl is crowned with a tiara and she tosses a rag doll into the crowd, are fantasies that only postpone the inevitable, she said. "The reality is that Latinas are ending up at the bottom of the American heap.... We need to prepare our girls for the life they are facing."

The stats she cites in her book are hard to swallow: Girls of Latino heritage have the highest teen pregnancy rate, the highest teen suicide rate and a high-school dropout rate second only to boys of Latino descent.

"This book is about what is happening in our community and about putting a new story in girls' heads," Álvarez said.

The author, who dazzled critics in 1991 with her first novel, "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents," will read from "Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA" at 7 p.m. tonight at Borders Books and Music, 6510 Canoga Ave., Canoga Park, and at 7 p.m. Thursday at Librería Martínez Books and Art Gallery, 1110 N. Main St., Santa Ana.

Kristina Lindgren