By Sonaiya Kelley / Los Angeles Times
Planning the perfect quinceanera is one thing. Planning the perfect quinceanera while still sporting fresh bruises from your first boxing match is another. Add cameras and a film crew to the mix and you’ll have an idea of what Ashley Lopez was dealing with.
“The most stressful part was the fight, of course,” Lopez said. “Because it wasn’t just a fight, it was going to be filmed by HBO. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s really big. If I lose, if I just get knocked out right here, the whole world’s going to see.’”
Lopez, an amateur boxer from East LA, is one of five subjects of a series of documentaries on the cable channel about quinceaneras, the celebration of a Latina’s 15th birthday.
In the same vein as MTV’s “My Super Sweet 16” (but with considerably less of that series’ signature privilege ), “15: A Quinceanera Story” aims to spotlight the myriad ways Latinas celebrate the day. The 30-minute films, which span celebrations in LA, Texas and Florida, run on consecutive nights, starting Tuesday.
Directed by Matthew O’Neill and executive produced by husband and wife duo Tommy Mottola and Thalia Sodi, the four films follow five Latina girls through the planning and staging of their unique quinceaneras.
“It was originally meant to be one film, but then we found so many incredible young women that it became four short films,” O’Neill said. “People too often think of the Latino community as monolithic; in these films, you see five young women who are fierce and dynamic in such different ways.
“They come from different backgrounds, different places, different passions and different personal stories. What unites them is the honoring of their community and their culture.”
The quinceanera is a rite of passage that historians say came about as a result of Spanish culture mixing with customs of the indigenous peoples the Spaniards colonized. Today, they are celebrated in Latin America, the Caribbean and the U.S.
The LA-based subjects are Lopez and Zoey Luna, a trans girl celebrating her quinceanera with several trans madrinas (or godmothers) who were never able to have celebrations of their own. “They’re so very supportive of me,” Luna said of her madrinas. “They’re basically like my fairy godmothers, honestly.”
To find subjects for the docs the filmmakers combined “the reach of the internet and good old-fashioned street walking,” O’Neill said.
“It was a pretty rigorous process. We reached out to every community around the country that we could. We talked to quinceanera planners, community activists, community organizations and found them in all sorts of different ways. For example, we found Ashley by walking along Whittier Boulevard and striking up conversations in every quinceanera dress shop.”
Luna was discovered when the filmmakers happened upon an article about a court case she and her mother, Ofelia, had against her public school. After administrators at the school asked her to transfer, the ACLU wrote a letter of support to make sure her rights were protected.
“I thought it would be a really great step into having trans inclusiveness in media,” Luna said of her quinceanera. “A lot of people don’t know transgender girls that are even teenagers, and so I thought it would be cool like, ‘Hey, I’m a trans teenage girl. It happens; it’s a normal thing.’ And also that we do have quinceaneras.”
Filming lasted for about seven months and captured the struggles leading up to the parties as well as the parties themselves. Lopez had to juggle preparing for both a huge fight and a huge party scheduled just days apart while her boxing coach was being threatened with deportation. Luna, on the other hand, struggled with drama among her classmates and with finding boys to participate in her chamberlain, or court.
“It’s really hard,” Luna said. “Because everyone wants to know, ‘Have you got the surgery? Did you get your nose job? Did you get your boobs done? Why do you have cellulite?’ There’s a lot of ignorance and a lot of hate, because people see me so confident, but I’m myself and I know who I am.”
“These young women inspire me,” O’Neill said. “They celebrate, I think, many of the different strands of what it means to be a young Latina today in the United States.
“Too often, the Latino community is defined in broad brushstrokes and generalizations. Really, the thing that unites these young women is the fact that they’re all celebrating their culture with a quinceanera. Otherwise, they’re totally different. And different in so many self-assured and self-confident ways.”
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