Subscribe
Jobs
Cars
Real Estate
Apts
Classifieds
Shop
On the surface, Nataly Luja and Mayra Alvarado have only a few basic details in common. Both are 15; both have lived in the United States for about a decade since their arrival from Mexico.
But they will be linked by the ritual quinceañera celebration at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church today, and a less obvious common bond: two hardworking mothers who were never quinceañeras and wanted different lives for their daughters.
Nataly Luja’s soft-spoken mother keeps a clean house, and she’s the type who doesn’t let a stranger walk inside without offering refreshment.
“Would you like something to drink?” Ana Luja asks a stranger with a welcoming smile.
Ana and Armando Luja offered the same generosity to their only daughter Nataly when it came to her 15th birthday – an event the Catholic Church celebrates as a Hispanic girl’s passage from childhood to adulthood.
Professional photography from Nataly’s Aug. 1 quinceañera celebration are bound in a white-and-pink scrapbook album. Her proud parents flank her in some of the photos. Some are from Mass – Nataly kneeling at the altar to receive Communion at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. In others, Nataly poses in her pale pink dress in Foster Park, much like a bride.
Her elaborate quinceañera celebration was a year in the making. The family planned for 600 guests; Nataly tried to persuade her parents to scale it down. Her mother is a certified nursing assistant, while her father is unemployed.
But the quinceañera celebration was an expense her parents had planned, and other family members and friends contributed. Nataly and her parents discussed how much they could afford and worked within that budget.
“They’ve been saving up for years now for it,” she said.
A 15th celebration is something Ana Luja never had growing up in Mexico. There were middle-class and lower-class people; she was in the lower class, she said.
Nataly has had a much different life. She was raised in American schools after attending preschool in Mexico. She’s lived in the modest, tidy brick house south of Fort Wayne for about five years. She takes piano lessons and is on the New Haven High School Student Council.
Her brother, Armando Jr., is just a year younger and, she confides, probably better at playing the piano.
“We don’t tell my parents that,” she said. “We just say we’re equal.”
These are the circumstances that shaped her quinceañera celebration – a loving family willing to sacrifice to make her birthday special.
Like many quinceañeras, Nataly traveled to Chicago to find her dress. She loved a pink one, but pink was such a popular color that she changed her mind and ordered a green dress.
That green dress – a lime shade that clashed with her skin tone – wasn’t “the one.” So she went back to that first pink dress. Feeling confident in the dress was important, because her party lasted until midnight.
Nataly remembers feeling odd being the center of attention. But her actual memories of the day are blurred, so she’s glad to have video and the photographs.
“I was all dressed up in a big poofy dress that I kept tripping over,” she said. “I sort of forget about it because it went by so fast.”
Mayra Alvarado tripped and clunked around the house in unfamiliar high heels, washing dishes, straightening the tidy living room.
The feminine exercise was part of South Side High School’s quinceañera celebration. High heels are a significant part of the celebration, another symbol of the transition to womanhood.
Mayra’s planning began about three months before the party Oct. 3, nine days before her birthday.
In addition to struggling to find a date, Mayra recalls struggling to learn the traditional dances and waltzes.
But Mayra, image-conscious as she is from the pink streak in her hair to her trendy flat shoes, didn’t have dancing on her mind.
“People were more worried about it than I was,” she said.
For Mayra, the quinceañera event was a reason for her grandparents to visit from Mexico. She had not seen them in years, and her grandfather is the person she most looks up to, she said.
In fact, if she had to choose between the quinceañera celebration and seeing her grandfather, Mayra insists she’d choose the latter.
“I love him so much,” she said. “It was, like, a really emotional day for me. I just held it in, because I didn’t want to make anybody cry.”
Various trappings of the party are scattered around her home. In the television cabinet are coral-colored table accessories. Hanging in the stairwell is a dress of the same shade, a color that puzzled people while planning the party. Is it pink? Is it orange?
Mayra has her own color classifications. “Pink” is the streak in her hair; “coral” is her dress. One coral accessory from the party is missing from Mayra’s home today – the ceremonial doll she received as part of the celebration, a symbolic last rite of childhood.
Her grandparents returned to Mexico around Halloween. Mayra surprised her grandmother by giving her the doll to remember her by, since she has no idea when she’ll see her grandparents again.
“She didn’t expect it,” Mayra said.
Mayra’s mother walks into the house just before 5 p.m. in a McDonald’s uniform. Maria Alvarado said she came from a huge family in Mexico, one of many daughters, and her parents couldn’t afford to give her a quinceañera celebration.
Like Nataly Luja, Mayra is the only girl in her family.
That’s why her parents rebuffed any of Mayra’s attempts to scale down her celebration. Maria Alvarado spoke Spanish, and in the same earnest tone, her daughter translated:
“Since I’m her only daughter, she wanted to take me to church and give thanks that I lived to 15.”
