Ana Rodriguez
Professor Aurora Abrera
English Composition II 1302- 21083
10 March 2016 Quinceañera, Judith Ortiz Cofer
In the poem “Quinceañera” by Judith Ortiz Cofer, the poet illustrates the transformation from girlhood to womanhood using the perspective of the speaker a fifteen-year-old girl. What is a quinceañera, you might say. A quinceañera which means sweet fifteen in Spanish is a celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday. It originally came from Latin America. It is the celebration of the transition of a female’s transition from girlhood to womanhood or as others say that this is a special day when a girl transforms from a child to a young woman to maturity and knowing that this is a rather joyous occasion for Hispanic women. When …show more content…
Like, for example, “My hair has been nailed back with my mother’s black hairpins to my skull” (6-8). Nailed back and black hairpins are disturbing words for a quinceañera to say. These images carryout darkness and unhappiness. The explanation of the speaker to the reader are the changes she must go through at the age of fifteen. For example, the changes of her simply giving away her possessions to actually doing things in preparation for getting married. The lines eleven through sixteen the speaker finds out that she is poisonous. “I am to wash my own clothes and sheets from this day on as if the fluids of my body were poison as if the little trickle of blood I believe travels from my heart to the world were shameful” (11-16). She finds herself this way poisonous because she is at the stage of life of puberty and as the days go by her body is forming into a new body, a new womanly body. Though the speaker is still quite young she does not understand the way certain things about womanhood. For example, like having to do chores and getting married. The speaker does not sound too excited or happy and she feels confused about this transition to