Las Payasas: Girlhood, Quinceañeras, and the Borderlands of Memory
- Paloma Aguirre
- Jun 4
- 3 min read
I grew up with my mother’s stories of life along the border—El Paso, New Mexico, Arizona, Juárez, and Chihuahua. Her childhood, woven with humor and heartache, was a landscape of blended cultures and layered memories. One day, while flipping through a dusty box of photos in my grandmother’s house in El Paso, I found a picture that would spark this project. It was a photo of my mom and her friends dressed as clowns at a quinceañera.
The story goes like this: the party was on Halloween, and my grandmother had mistakenly told the girls it was a costume party. So off they went, decked out in full clown regalia—bright wigs, face paint, and all. It wasn’t a costume party. But my grandmother made them stay anyway. Literal and metaphorical clowns for the night.
That moment, equal parts hilarious and mortifying, became the seed for Las Payasas, a comic I created to explore girlhood, identity, and growing up between cultures.
Channeling Girlhood Through Comics
In my comic (link below), three teenage girls are invited to a quinceañera on Halloween. Most of the story focuses on them planning their outfits—a joyful ritual that, for many, is the best part of any event. I wanted to celebrate that pre-party anticipation and the importance of aesthetic expression during adolescence.
The girls deliberate over costume ideas, inspired by the pop culture my mom loved as a teen in the '80s: Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Dirty Dancing, La Bamba, Top Gun, and music from Whitney Houston, A-ha, The Cure, and Depeche Mode.
These nostalgic references are more than window dressing—they’re cultural markers that speak to a generation’s tastes, dreams, and identities. For the girls in the comic, they also become a way to bond, resist embarrassment, and rewrite humiliation as humor. It’s about friendship transforming cringe into comedy—a kind of borderland solidarity.
The Quinceañera as Borderlands Ritual
This story isn’t just about an outfit mishap. It’s also a reflection on the quinceañera as a ritual that blends sacred and secular, tradition and pop culture. Drawing on Rachel González-Martin’s essay, “Barrio Ritual and Pop Rite: Quinceañeras in the Folklore–Popular Culture Borderlands,” I thought about how these celebrations function as cultural texts. As González-Martin writes, “ideas of latinidad are mediated through processes of shared memory” (in Frederick Luis Aldama’s edited, The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Popular Culture). In that sense, this comic is a part of a layered archive: a story passed down orally, visually, and now graphically.
González-Martin also critiques the commodification of the quinceañera in mainstream media, questioning representations that flatten its meaning into consumer spectacle. My intention isn’t to sell Latinx culture, nor to depict a universal quince. Instead, I offer a specific story that straddles both intergenerational wisdom and the peer-based dynamics of teenage life. It’s where family traditions clash—or harmonize—with youth culture.
Clowning as Mestiza Consciousness
The fact that the quinceañera was on Halloween adds another layer. In the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, October 31st sits in a cultural tangle: American Halloween, Mexican Día de los Muertos, and whatever hybrid celebrations families create in between. For first-gen kids, knowing what’s expected can feel like a guessing game. What’s appropriate? What’s tradition? And what if your traditions don’t align?
In Las Payasas, the clown becomes a symbol of the borderlands experience—out of place, mismatched, and yet defiantly present. It’s a moment where cultural codes misfire, but the girls endure. There’s power in that resilience. As González-Martin notes, quince practices today are shaped as much by online peer networks as by family legacy (285). In this story, the tension between those forces plays out in lipstick, laughter, and latex wigs.
A Tribute to My Mother
Though the real-life event came with more mother-daughter conflict than I chose to portray, the comic focuses on joy. My mom’s relationship with her own mother is complicated, but she’s always found humor in her past. She’s sharp, dry, and deeply funny—a storyteller in her own right. I created Las Payasas not to trivialize her experiences, but to honor them. This comic is a tribute: to her, to the borderlands, and to the mestiza consciousness that takes shape in the messy, meaningful rituals of becoming.
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