Author Archives: Jay Berajawala

Quinceañera Festival

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/15/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Informant Bio: Informant is a friend and fellow business major.  He is a junior at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.  His family is from Mexico but he has lived in Southern California for nearly all of his life.

 

Context: I was talking to Fabian about Mexican stories and folklore.  He started mentioning how there are several important festivals/traditions one goes through in traditional Mexican culture, one of them being the quinceañera festival.  He then detailed his experiences going to close family and friends’ festivals throughout his life.

 

Item: “It’s a coming of age kind of thing for girls.  The way they work is there’s a royal core that is usually made of, uh, direct blood relatives (female and male) and also really close female and male friends.  There’s a chambelan which is the quinceañera’s escort which is either the boyfriend or girlfriend if they have one, or a close male relative or a really close male friend.  This is the quinceañera’s main escort for the night.  So, uh, it all starts off with a dance.  The dance varies, but the entire core people perform this choreographed dance that they do.  Once they are done, then the main guy and the quinceañera girl have a solo dance in the middle.  This is a little more elaborate and involves just those two.  It’s usually a waltz.  And then, um, the guy gives the girl to her dad and there’s a father-daughter dance.  And then, after that, like, there’s just kind of eating and kind of a regular party.  The main difference between celebrations comes from the type of dance that is performed at the beginning.”

 

Analysis: The quinceañera party helps celebrate a woman’s coming-of-age and sexual maturity.  The order of events in Fabian’s recounting parallels the path of the girl thus-far in her life.  In the beginning, all the close friends and family are involved in a special dance, showing how the girl has thus far been raised and been intimately connected with her close friends and family.  Then, the girl is given to the special chambelan who gets to dance with the girl, representing how the girl will move on from her childhood familial upbringing and find a suitable mate in society.  The subsequent father-daughter dance is an homage to the fact that the original man in her life for the past fifteen years has been her father.  This dance represents the fact that the father will continue to respect his daughter (but shifting from treating her as a little girl to treating her as a woman).  This celebration is a very important event in Mexican and Hispanic culture, and traditionally is maintained even for families that have moved to the United States.

 

In the Mexican tradition, the most important element of the quinceañera is a Thanksgiving mass that commences the celebration.  After this mass, the girl enters the banquet hall or wherever the celebration is being held.  Typically, the girl was not able to dance in public before the age of 15, so the dance with the chambelan is the girl’s first public dance.  Therefore, this event would be very important in the girl’s life and something that girls look forward to for months or even years prior.

This tradition has many parallels to the American tradition of a Sweet 16 party.  They both celebrate the coming of age of girls (marking the transition from child to woman).  Quinceañera’s, as written above, are elaborate celebrations held in banquet halls, and can be extremely formal and has a relatively set progression.  The sweet 16, a celebration of a young girl’s virginity, varies much more.  Although some folks make it a formal celebration, many times it is a more informal house party or get-together of close family friends and relatives.  At its core, the variations in sweet 16’s shows the diversity in American culture, while the relative rigidity of the quinceañera shows the more homogeneous Mexican culture (highly tied to Catholicism).

Mexican Egg Massage

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/15/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Informant Bio: Informant is a friend and fellow business major.  He is a junior at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.  His family is from Mexico but he has lived in Southern California for nearly all of his life.

 

Context: I was talking to Fabian about Mexican stories and folklore.  He shared with me the following superstition that is prominent in his family’s village where his grandmother still lives.

 

Item: “If someone is feeling bad, not always, but sometimes.  What they do is they get this massage with an egg that has been dipped in holy water.  They just kind of rub it on your back, arms and stuff.  Then they make the sign of the cross on your back, chest and forearms.  It’s supposed to be a blessing kind of thing.  Once you’re done, you crack the egg in a cup of water.  When you do it, the egg, which has been shaken from being rolled around your body, has a very opaque yolk which kind of represents the evil from your body.  The yolk is then released from the egg, and, supposedly the evil, which is contained in that opaque yolk, is then released from the body and dispelled into the water.  This is usually done by older women.  There are some people that have a lot of knowledge/spiritual energy to them that perform a lot of these massages for people in the villages.  A lot of the older women – the grandmothers – mostly know how to do it.”

 

Informant Analysis: Many superstitions in Mexico involve direct contact and touching using crosses, since Mexico is such a religious place.

 

Analysis: This superstition seems to involve the idea of contagious magic, the idea that things that have been in direct contact can have influence and interact with each other.  The informant’s comment that many superstitions involve direct contact and touching seems to reinforce that Mexican beliefs heavily involve contagious magic.  It makes sense that Crosses are used due to the deeply religious nature of the country.

 

The opaque egg yolk symbolizing the presence of evil brings about the idea of order being good and disorder being bad.  Something being jumbled up represents disorder, something that civilization and society has tried to eliminate.

 

The fact that older women usually perform this ritual exhibits the very powerful position that they have in Mexican familial hierarchy, as they are revered as being knowledgeable and beyond reproach by anyone else in the family.  The informant recounted a time when he yelled at his grandmother and was ostracized from his extended family for months after.  It is possible to disobey/yell at other family members, but the grandmother is off limits, showing the position they hold in Mexican familial structures.

Little House Elves

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/15/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Informant Bio: Informant is a friend and fellow business major.  He is a junior at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.  His family is from Mexico but he has lived in Southern California for nearly all of his life.

 

Context: I was talking to Fabian about Mexican stories and folklore.  He shared with me the following folk belief common among the people in Michocoan.

 

Item: “There’s, um, little house elves, um, they are mischievous and moves things in your sleep.  If you wake up in the middle of the night you’ll find milk outside the fridge, your shoes or socks out in random places.  The people who do that are these mischievous little house elves.  People, um try and stay up and try to see if they can catch them”.

 

Analysis: It is a way of explaining how things seemingly disappear or how random things move.  The elf part is similar to the cobbler elves in the U.S., where they come out and do things but you never end up seeing them.

No Sea Voyage on Tuesdays

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/18/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Informant Bio: Informant is a friend and fellow business major.  He is a sophomore at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.  His family is from Mexico.  He has moved around both Mexico and the U.S., spending significant time in Illinois.  He currently lives in Southern California.

 

Context: I was interviewing Stan about folk beliefs and traditions that he has been exposed to.  He shared with me the following folk belief common among the people in Mexico.

 

Item: “El martes no te cases ni te embarcues” – never embark on a voyage on a Tuesday.  If you do, your ship will sink.  Even if you don’t believe it, people still don’t “test” it.”

 

Informant Analysis: Not sure about why Tuesday is bad, but people in his town heed this rule.

 

Analysis: Although the specific day of Tuesday might be related to some distant family member or someone in the village experiencing bad sailing luck on a Tuesday, the superstition has stuck around and pervaded in the town of the informant.  Most likely, empirical evidence would show no merit to the claim, but the people in this town must subscribe to the idea that the day of the week inherently has virtues or characteristics that are associated with it.

Funerals in Mexico

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/18/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Informant Bio: Informant is a friend and fellow business major.  He is a sophomore at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.  His family is from Mexico.  He has moved around both Mexico and the U.S., spending significant time in Illinois.  He currently lives in Southern California.

 

Context: I was interviewing Stan about folk beliefs and traditions that he has been exposed to.  He shared with me the characteristics of Mexican funerals.

 

Item: “Um, funerals really depend and vary from person to person and family to family.  The range of emotion is very great.  Everything is acceptable.  Hispanic people are very expressive with feelings: wailing, yelling, screaming, and, pounding on the casket (in Colombia) are all acceptable ways of expressing yourself.  There’s no real, like, ‘you have to act in a certain way,’ as long as you have respect for the dead.  One can grieve however they see fit.  Most of the time, there is a casket and subsequent burial.  Husbands get buried next to their wives, and, wealthier people sometimes have mausoleums.

 

People who leave Mexico like to come back to be buried there.  Like, there was this famous Mexican song about this whole thing: Mexico my beloved, if I happen to die away from you, let them tell everyone that I am just sleeping till I come back”.

 

Informant Analysis: The family unit is really important in Mexico.  Religion is also important.  People always get anointed on the death bed as holy rituals are extremely important.  Your final moments and this tradition are important for the person to pass away with a clear conscience and be ready for final judgment.

 

Analysis: Death in Mexico is treated a little bit differently than here in the U.S.  Mexico has more of a tradition of being more open with the topic and treatment of death, seen with the Day of the Dead ritual, in which people celebrate the lives of their ancestors instead of grieving about their passing.  This is shown in the relative openness of grieving behaviors and emotions as compared to the accepted morbid mood that is expressed at U.S. funerals.

 

The significance of the song is that Mexican people have strong national and ethnic pride.  Even if they have left their native land, they still feel a strong connection to their true “home” and never forget their roots and heritage.  This is shown in their desire to have their final resting place be in the land of Mexico, being buried next to their family and closest partner.