I have always admired my writer friends who write nonfiction—they seem to have their writing hand right on the pulse of what is happening. They travel to interesting places, interview interesting people, and experience first hand what they are writing about.

Fiction writers do that, too, but since they are "making things up," their job is not to render what they are experiencing but to do the research in order to credibly create the world and characters they are inventing.

Real people, actual events, our cultural reporter out in the field. Wow! I thought. The new (Latina) Joan Didion! We tend to romanticize other genres—so much more "easy" and exciting than our own grunt labor! Ultimately, we learn good writing is hard work, no matter the genre. And I also think writing nonfiction can make you a better writer of fiction. You learn to pay very close attention, to listen carefully to what is said, what is not said, and oh, the most difficult part, to get people—we're all in so much of a hurry—to take the time to talk with you.

Of course it helped that I am a Latina. The girls and their familias welcomed me into their lives and into the intimacy of this special celebration. This cariño extended to me created its own kind of worry, as you can imagine. How could I look critically at an experience that was tender and "sacred" to this family who had been so generous to me?

All those challenges deepen and season you as a writer. As I tell my writing students, anything you write, even a letter, a journal entry—whatever—if you work till you sweat ink (!) at saying "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed," you are practicing your craft, you are honing your writing skills. Any writing you do is an opportunity to learn how to improve your writing.

Quinceañeras are similar to other coming of age ceremonies: a young person is acknowledged publicly as now being an adult member of the tribe.

Quinceañeras are coming of age ceremonies for Latina girls when they turn fifteen (quince años, thus, "quinceañera"). They can be highly elaborate and ritualized. Many start with a mass that is kind of like a wedding without the groom. The girl is traditionally dressed in a pink gown (white being reserved for brides). She is blessed by the priest, who also blesses certain symbolic objects: the quinceañeras first set of heels, her crown, her "last doll". These symbolic objects are part of the ceremony that opens the party part of the celebration in which her father changes her shoes from flats to heels, her mother crowns her, she receives a last doll from a madrina (godmother), and sometimes, like the bride with her bouquet, she tosses this "last doll" into a crowd of screaming little girls who will some day be quinceañeras, too. Now, as a woman, she dances her first public dance as an adult with her papi—traditionally, the dance is a waltz and then a dance that is more specific to the country of origin: a merengue for Dominicans, a danzón for Cubans. Throughout this ritual she is accompanied by a "court" of 14 couples, representing her 14 years, as well as her escort, who will be handed the young lady after the men in her family (father, grandfather, brothers, sometimes a dozen uncles!) have danced with her.

The ceremony can be quite touching. (I always cry when the young girl in her new heels and tiara gets paraded in front of all the guests, who give her a standing ovation—of course! Our beautiful strong young women, the next generation. We commit to protect and nurture and respect them. Hand me the Kleenex.) But unfortunately, quinces are becoming increasingly showy and over the top. As a Cuban friend of mine described it, "the quinceañera came to the States and took steroids!"

It is a ceremony that is only celebrated for girls. And what I found most intriguing is that second and third generation girls who in every other way have assimilated into mainstream American culture and are insisting on having quinceañeras as "part of my culture."

Quinceañeras are most definitely an important cultural marker moment. If you had one, you won't ever forget it. (Whereas a wedding that ends in divorce you might not want to remember, as some quinceañera moms pointed out to me). I mean even if later you make fun of your powder-puff dress or the enormous hairdo on your head, you had your quince. In fact, there's a saying in Spanish that's equivalent to "I was young once, too!" that says, "I, too, had my quinces." Meaning both that you were once fifteen, but also that you had your quince party.

Whether the effect is positive or not really depends on what kind of quinceañera you have. If it's just about consumerism, showing off rather than celebrating our young women, then it is definitely not a positive thing. Also, how can you take a tradition and reinvest it with meaning in a new country. That's part of the challenge, part of the reason I wanted to write this book.

One last little tidbit—I was interviewing Norma Pérez from Disneyland about the new push Disneyland is making to host quinceañeras. Norma was really enthusiastic about all the wonderful features of having your quince at Disneyland, including celebrating with all these Disney characters you had grown up with. Somehow she let out the fact that her own daughter would be celebrating her quince a few months later. "So are you having it at Disneyland?" I asked, pretty sure that of course, after all the glowing descriptions; Norma would throw her daughter's quince there. Plus, I imagined the discounts for employees. But Norma said, no. They were having a more "home-based," traditional quince. A lot of family was coming. "We started planning for this the day she was born," Norma explained. "It's important for second and third generation Hispanics to pass their culture on to their children." She wasn't yet ready to release such a monumental watershed moment to the American mainstream, even if she was working in it and for it!

My hope is that the book will persuade girls and their families to have more meaningful quinceañeras, if they choose to have one. All over America we are seeing young people really hungry for authentic rituals and in need of mentoring.

Quinceañeras are wildly popular now. I interviewed Will Cain, founder of Quince Girl, a national magazine for young Latinas around the theme of their quinceañeras. He explained how there was a movement now among third generation Latinos, which he called "retroculturation." These young Latino/as, totally American in many ways, are actually reaching back and embracing their original culture as a source of pride. They want to speak Spanish. They want to hold on to their traditions, to establish cultural ties with their past.

I think it's important that we help them do this rather than let the American consumer market take over and sell them a hyped up version of what their culture and traditions are all about. Again, I hope my book is part of that mentoring and passing on. We who are the "bridge generation" can help the young connect with their culture. In doing this, we should also reflect upon and understand what we pass on.

This celebration is for girls only. In my research, I did run across different programs that do incorporate boys—for instance the Stay-at-School-quinceañera program in Idaho is co-ed. Sister Angela Erevia, who is a very strong force in the Mexican-American Catholic community, now runs programs that are for both girls and boys. In fact, she now calls the ceremony, "a quince años celebration," to make the celebration include both. She insists—and I do agree with her—that Latino youth, male and female, all need this kind of leadership and guidance during the tough years of becoming adults in a culture that often fails them, where they tend to lose their way.

Our boys definitely need rituals and mentoring. In a way, they do get both indirectly even in a female quinceañera because remember, as half of the court (14 girls and 14 boys, plus quinceañera's escort), the boys are gathering together with the young girls and their families and are a part of the rehearsals and preparations.

Perhaps this tradition will evolve into one that is also celebrated by males—a reverse of the bar mitzvah, which was just for males, until the 20s when the bat mitzvah came along for females. In fact, a recent article in The Latina Voz, says "The fastest-growing group of quince converts is young boys. More and more parents are lavishing their sons with parties, limousines, speeches—everything except the dress."

I like the idea of having a ritual that is just for our young women. They have a different set of challenges and though the Latino culture as a whole gets a bad rap for its machismo and sexism there is also deeply embedded in the culture a respect and wonder for the sacredness of female sexuality. . . I'd like to cultivate and preserve those moments as a culture where we acknowledge how important our women are, where we celebrate their creative force, their beauty, their intelligence, their power.

I want to say yes, but of course, I'd follow her nature as to how to celebrate her coming of age. What would be important would be to have a way to pass on the traditions, the stories and culture in a meaningful way. I think rituals help us to frame and focus important moments in our lives, and by gathering together our family and community, they also give us a chance to reflect and celebrate what is important as a community. I wouldn't want to lose that in the great democracy of choice or display of consumerism.

In fact, I was talking to one of the women working in the SHERO project, an empowerment program for young girls, Mimi Doll. It was at a point when the incredible expense and excess of the evolving USA quinceañera were making me lose patience with this "tradition." Mimi reminded me that our traditions are in place to help take care of us as a people. We mustn't throw them out or we stay unprotected, disconnected from the past, from each other, from ourselves; we become a people without a story. What is important is to re-envision our traditions so that they continue to take care of us in a new context, whether that is a new country or a new time in history.

I was actually asked to write this book by an editor at a Penguin imprint. He and his staff were intrigued by the quinceañera tradition in the Latino community. When they contacted me about writing a book about quinces, I thought, "No, no, no! First, I'm basically a fiction writer. Second, I'm not the girly-girl type, and these princessy parties are not my thing." But the editor was persistent and asked me to think about it. . .

One of the things I love about being a writer is that it offers me an opportunity to get an education and learn all kinds of new things! Even when I'm writing fiction, let's say I have a story set in 1803 about a doctor; I've got to learn all about medicine in the 19th century, so I can write credibly from his point of view. So as a writer, I love it that I'm always learning. The quinceañera book gave me the opportunity to learn new skills. That appealed to me. I got to be a journalist and travel around, get into scrapes, interview people, collect first-hand information.

Also, I live in the "Latino-compromised" state of Vermont (though this is changing). I get a hit of my Latino culture when I travel down to the Dominican Republic. Researching quinces throughout the USA allowed me to travel and connect with different Latino communities all around the country. That also appealed to me.

Finally, as I began to read the research on Latina youth and realized the crisis situation among our young people who were topping the charts for most at-risk behaviors (teen pregnancy, high school drop outs, poverty, drug use, gang membership, etc.), I grew curious about the disjunction between this "fantasy celebration" and the alarming, very real situation out there. What was going on? I wanted to find out.

The book presented me with the opportunity to acquaint myself with a community I don't automatically have here in Vermont. And yet, I feel very much a part of my Latino culture through what I write and my ongoing strong ties to the Dominican Republic, my native land. I was curious as to what was happening to us here in the United States, where we've become a Pan-Hispanic community, combining and enriching our traditions, among them the quinceañera.

I wanted to learn what the second and third upcoming Latino generations were thinking and doing. I also knew that as the new boom segment of the population with many businesses, politicians, you name it, seeking us out, we had to be conscious and careful about understanding our choices, defining ourselves, not having others define and manipulate us.

I mean even the name often used to describe us, "Hispanic," is a term invented for us in 1973 by a directive from the administration for use in the census. (By the way, though I dislike the term, I also don't think "Latino" is free of the "taint" often ascribed to "Hispanic," of a name given to us by a colonizing dominant culture. The term Latino—from Latin/ pennisular Spanish roots hearkens back to an earlier domination/colonization!) But I do think it's important for us to define ourselves, understand our mixtures, recognize our complex legacy, and our wonderful, rich culture. Not let others tell us what our traditions are and how to celebrate them.

What surprised me in researching the quinceañera was discovering to what a large extent we have let the market tell us what this tradition is about. How much has been "invented" about its origin. We are passing down inaccuracies and "stories" that don't really tell our young people the truth about who we are, don't recognize our complexity, and most especially acknowledge the confusing legacy historically of being female in our culture. The quinceañera is a wonderful space in which to have these conversations with our young women.

Besides reading and watching films and interviewing dozens of girls and their families and events providers, I also traveled around the country and attended quite a few quinceañeras. I had to get some party outfits, because along with being Latino compromised, we just don't have many big fancy parties here in rural Vermont.

Actually, the quinceañera tradition is celebrated throughout the countries of Latin, Central America, and the Caribbean. But you are right; it is not celebrated in Spain.

It is the one tradition that is pretty much "shared" by the different Latino communities—even though other things, like cuisine and music, differ. It's one of the reasons that here in the USA, companies doing promotion to procure Latino consumers choose the quinceañera as a "target tradition." (For example: both Maggi, a subsidiary of Nestlé USA, and Kern's Nectar sponsor yearly quinceañera Sweepstakes. Why? Kern's Nectar announcement explains: "Next to marriage, a quinceañera is perhaps the most meaningful moment in a young woman's life.") The tradition has some variations depending on the different communities (Mexican–American, Dominican–American, Cuban–American, Panamanian–American) but it seems to be a ritual that is "universally embraced."

As for some of these differences: the Mexican-American community almost always starts with a mass, whereas our Caribbean (Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican) quinceañeras often forego the religious aspect and just have the party. Another aspect in the Mexican-American community is that almost every detail of the quinceañera is sponsored by a madrina or padrino—godmother or godfather. There is the "madrina del vestido" (godmother of the dress), "the madrina del cake," el padrino del limo" (godfather of the limo), "el padrino del D.J." You get a Mexican-American invitation and inside is a foldout listing a dozen or more godmothers and godfathers. It makes sense economically because the whole community is sharing the cost, but it's also a symbolic statement: we are all invested in this young woman's safe, happy, and successful crossing into adulthood. We value her. This message is not lost on the young woman, believe me.

What is happening, though, in our Pan-Hispanic culture in the USA is that all our individual traditions are kind of mixing and merging, so that now the "traditional" USA quinceañera has embraced aspects of all our different countries. Two of the four Dominican quinces I went to started with a mass. Some Cuban quinces are opening with a mariachi (which is a Mexican tradition). The tradition of the little tiny girl dressed up in a miniscule version of the quinceañera's dress, representing the "symbol of innocence," which seems to have started in Puerto Rico (I also heard Central America), now is a popular aspect of the quinceañeras "court" throughout the USA.

It's very interesting how this is happening on many levels to us as a Latino community. Here on USA soil, we are forming a great alliance, never fully achieved as distinct countries in this hemisphere. (This is the very alliance that José Martí dreamed about. "Nuestra América," he called it.) Out of our many countries of origin, we are merging into one Latino confederation here on USA soil. This is great, but I think we also need to be careful that the coming together is not dictated to us by the outside, by a greedy market. That what holds us together isn't the cheap glue of consumerism.

Actually, my editor asked me to do this from the start—both to make the book more than just an objective, critical study and also to give the Latino tradition a generational perspective. What was it like for me as a first generation Latina to come of age in the USA in the early 60s? What were some of the difficulties? What insights had I gained that might be useful to young Latinas coming of age today and to all of us in trying to understand the increasingly large section of our USA population.

Was I nervous—you bet! There's a way in which when you are writing fiction, you really are using aspects of your own past but always in the service of the story. It doesn't matter that something "really happened" if it doesn't really work in the fiction. So, you bend the truth, you take a little of your own experience, you invent, you merge it with other experiences you've heard about, read about. . .

But when you are writing "memoir" —not that it isn't already a story you have "made up" to connect the facts of your life—you are trying to be true to the facts, rather than the fiction. No hiding behind your main character! Gulp! And yet I felt that one of the things that had been so difficult for me in my coming of age as a Latina (and all through subsequent stages) is that we never spoke about a lot of these issues with our mothers or within our families. Sexuality, male-female relationships, ambition, self-determination, racism, sexism. . . We never discussed these things—in part, we didn't have the vocabulary to do so—until after the Civil Rights Movement, after the Women's Movement; until after we ourselves had succeeded in catching our breath and making a living in this new culture; until, that is, now. . .

And now. . .we are the "new Americans," according to the statistics. We are Latinizing and transforming this culture just as it has and continues to transform us. Including my own story was a way to look at that continuum from a personal perspective.

I think I've mentioned some of these hopes throughout. I'd like for all of us—as a community and as a country—to think about how we are preparing our young people to be the adults and leaders of tomorrow. What are we passing on to them that is meaningful and useful and also gives them a sense of their traditions and culture and roots? Our young people ache for this kind of connection and support.

I also hope that non-Latino readers will gain a little more understanding about this very important community that is transforming the United States. This is especially important as we tackle the issues of immigration that are before us. Part of the greatness of America has always been that it is a country made up of many countries and cultures. E pluribus unum. Out of the many, one. This country has a way of absorbing and using what our immigrants and newcomers bring here and becoming richer for these infusions. Just looking at our language shows this—our American English has so many words that came from somewhere else and are now "ours": faux pas, saloon, kosher, spiel, lager, fiesta, mosquito, easel, ketchup—what could be more "American" than ketchup, which is a word borrowed originally from Chinese!

So, if my book encourages us to reflect upon our traditions and claim them but also make them more meaningful, I'd consider the principal wish for my book to have come true.