Quinceanera Quackery

At the New York Times, a film about a pregnant 15-year-old is cause for celebration, since the girl is a Mexican immigrant. Pass the popcorn, er nachos [1], and let the diversity begin!

"Quinceanera [2]," a portrait of a Mexican-American family in Los Angeles, is as smart and warmhearted an exploration of an upwardly mobile immigrant culture as American independent cinema has produced. Set in Echo Park, a working-class Latino neighborhood in the early throes of gentrification, it has a wonderfully organic feel for the fluid interaction of cultures and generations in the Southern California melting pot.

Without pinning smile buttons onto its characters, the film, a prize winner at this year's Sundance festival, takes a benign look at the conflicts and crises of three generations of a resilient family whose principal breadwinner, Ernesto (Jesus Castanos-Chima), operates a storefront church. Illegal immigration is not an issue here, and the film optimistically assumes that newcomers to the country carry with them a surge of vitality.

The central character, Magdalena (Emily Rios), Ernesto's ebullient 14-year-old daughter, is anticipating her Quinceanera, the traditional ceremony that celebrates a girl's official passage into womanhood at 15. [...]

Magdalena's future is thrown into disarray when she suddenly finds herself pregnant by her puppyish boyfriend, Herman (J. R. Cruz), and her father throws her out of the house in a rage. (Her pregnancy comes as a complete surprise because it is a rare instance of a girl's conceiving while remaining technically intact during intense petting.) But when Magdalena insists that she is still a virgin, her father refuses to believe her. Herman's mother, fiercely ambitious for her college-bound son, won't listen to her story and keeps him out of her reach.
['Quinceanera': Turning Sweet 15 in Los Angeles's Immigrant Stew [3], 8/4/06]

Preggers without sex? That's getting into Virgin Birth [4] territory, as in Jesus and Mary -- extreme immigrant worship even by normal Hollyweird [5]standards. Apparently the characters are too precious to fornicate normally like Hispanic teens do all the time, as shown by Latino girls having the highest teen birth rate [6] in America.

More importantly, there is no mention that Mexicans have imported their retrosexual [7] peasant ideas about women to the United States [8]. An American girl of 15 is looking at three more years of high school, followed by college [9]in many cases, while even an "upwardly mobile" Mexigrant of that age i [10]s expected to marry and have lots of children ASAP. And they do. [11]

As sociologists have often observed, children who have children are some of the surest prospects for a life of poverty. The New York Times [12]' celebration of this self-destructive custom shows that the liberal blinders remain unmoved.