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It is a Mexican tradition for girls to celebrate their coming of
age with an elaborate party when they turn fifteen. In Mexico
they refer to this time in girls' lives, lingering on the cusp
of womanhood, as La edad de las Ilusiones, the age of illusions.
The saying goes that fifteen year-old girls are old enough to
fantasize about adult life but too young to have to accept its
realities. I am working on a series of photographs about girls
coming of age in Mexico and in Mexican-American communities in
the United States. All the girls in my photographs are fifteen.
I photograph some of them on the day of their parties or during
the course of the following year, others who do not even have
parties for economic or personal reasons. Beyond the details of
the ritual itself, I am particularly interested in the effort
to somehow make tangible the ephemeral transition from niña to
señorita, using the quince años as a guiding metaphor, my photographs
explore the notion of naming the moment when a girl becomes a
woman and the complex range of individual and collective cultural
"illusions? about female identity that this tradition encourages.
Mexican teenage girls are growing up at a time in social history
when ideas about the role of women in their culture are in flux.
Those on the US side of the border are literally living in a different
country from the one their mothers grew up in, but even girls
in Mexico find themselves in a world very different for women
than it was a generation ago. Their mothers, the Catholic church,
indigenous tradition, and (perhaps most significantly) the pervasive
US media and consumer culture all show conflicting images of what
it means to be female. With this project I aim to explore how
girls envision themselves as adult women in the face of such mixed
messages. In my pictures I deliberately acknowledge the self-conscious
act of posing for the camera, because I am interested in the psychological
implications of the self-image they project. I hope to incorporate
each girl's ideas of what is beautiful, sexy, glamorous and feminine
into their portraits.
I was born in the United States and I lived in Mexico throughout
my own adolescence. As a result I grew up straddling the same
disparate cultures as the girls in my pictures. The majority of
images of Mexican women exhibited in the United States reduce
them to an antiquated cultural stereotype: the "exotic? - indigenous
woman, bare-breasted or swathed in colorful material, an icon
of universal suffering devaid of sexuality or individuality. With
this project I hope to paint a more three dimensional portrait
of Mexican female experience. The age fifteen may be idiosyncratically
Mexican, but the experience of coming of age transcends national
boundaries. In this country it is more important than ever to
counter anti-immigrant attitudes and racism with images that break
down stereotypes, emphasize common experience and encourage cross-cultural
understanding.
Anna LeVIne
Anna LeVine can be reached at:
annafoto@aol.com
This project has been made possible by the generous support of
the Fulbright
Commission, the Massachusetts Cultural Council,
The Charles Beseler Company and Ilford Limited, U.S.A.
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