Based off of this week’s reading, I became interested in the idea of feminism and the quinceañera. I initially thought that there wasn’t an intersection between the two concepts, but after reading about the different aspects of the quinceañera I definitely see how the two can relate. That sparked my interested in terms of finding other scholars that see this connection as well. I came upon a short commentary by Charlotte Hernandez that gave me another insight into feminism for women of color.

Hernandez interviewed different women of color about how they experience feminism and how that changes the way they see their culture. Most of the responses tended to show that these women saw feminism in one category and their cultural ties in another. Meaning that feminism couldn’t exist for them if they obey the rules of their cultures. Sylvia, one of the women Hernandez quotes, says that she rejected the idea of the quinceañera because she wanted to reject the “sexist parts of [her] culture that go against [her] feminist consciousness.” Hernandez also points out the complication through all of this in writing that culture isn’t just a “collection of ideas and traditions but an important support system”(Hernandez, 20). To me, these ideas seem really rigid and it’s an either/other type of situation; either you consider yourself a feminist or you want to have cultural ties.

The reading from this week breaks down these complications and makes a point to say that feminism and culture aren’t really opposite things. The work of Dr. Davalos and Norma Cantú seem to prove this point best and I think they do it in really sophisticated manners. Cantú writes that the fiesta part of the quinceañera is “an ever-changing performance and not a fixed, homogenous artifact”(Cantú, 1). Davalos writes about the traditional aspect of the quinceañera as “an open, and sometimes chaotic, terrain that is constantly reconfigured in everyday experience” (Davalos, 103). For both of these women to argue that culture is fluid and not fixed creates an entirely new dimension to feminism for women of color. I think this is where the difference is between the work of Hernandez and the other scholars. To be critical of the work by Hernandez, I think she would have been able to take her analysis a bit further if she just understood that point.

Hernandez, Charlotte. “Juggling the Feminism and the Family: Women of Color and Feminism.” Off Our Backs Vol. 26, No. 3 (1996): pg 20. http://0-www.jstor.org.linus.lmu.edu/stable/20835420