The Rise of the Midlife Coming-of-Age Party
6 min read
On the day of her big coming-of-age bash, Audrey Calzada wore a tiara. Mariachi played. Friends performed a synchronized dance to Rema’s “Calm Down,” and she had a mid-party outfit change from a sequined midnight-blue gown to a gold one—just like so many other girls might do at their quinceañeras, the ritual for 15-year-olds that’s celebrated across Latin American cultures and their diaspora. But Calzada, who works in the oil industry in Texas, had passed the quinceañera milestone decades ago. She was about to hit her 50th birthday, and she was determined to celebrate with pizzazz. “The joke in my community,” she told me, “is that I’m extra.”
Calzada is one of several women I spoke with who, upon turning 50, chose to celebrate a cincuentañera—a remixed version of the quinceañera that’s become more popular in recent years. On TikTok, some videos of these parties have racked up more than 1 million views. Certain hallmarks of the quinceañera, such as ball gowns and father-daughter waltzes, show up, while others, such as the gift of a “last doll,” get ditched for whatever the women prefer. “50 never looked so good,” one celebrant wrote on TikTok, captioning a video of herself catwalking in a pink dress, a tiara, and aviator shades.
Some women’s families have planned their parties for them. Other women have orchestrated the festivities themselves. Yet most women I spoke with had at least one thing in common: They wanted nothing to do with the bleak depictions of older age that they were being fed. Many women at 50 “have been led to believe that life is over,” Norma Elia Cantú, a professor at Trinity University, told me. She referred to “Over the hill” birthday cards and party favors making the rounds at many midlife fetes, items suggesting that life’s latter half is an ugly descent into irrelevance, ended only by the unforgiving slap of death. Cantú, in planning her own cincuentañera in 1997, had no interest in this sort of gloom. “I wanted to counteract that,” she said, “and make it a celebration.”
The hunger for meaningful midlife festivities of course extends beyond the Latino community. In the film Between Two Temples, released last month, a retired music teacher in upstate New York undergoes bat mitzvah preparations in late adulthood, mirroring real-life rituals in the Jewish tradition offered to older congregants at certain synagogues. Secular celebrations such as “croning ceremonies” and menopause parties are also growing in popularity across the U.S.
For Latina women in the United States, celebrating a cincuentañera goes beyond just defying stereotypes about aging—it’s a culturally resonant way to honor the life that they’ve built, often with the kind of splash that many couldn’t afford as girls. Argenis Gonzalez, a quinceañera planner in Orlando, Florida, told me he estimates that 70 percent of his clients’ mothers never got to celebrate a quince of their own because of a lack of money. Julia Alvarez, in her nonfiction cultural study Once Upon a Quinceañera, writes that many first-generation Latinas skipped theirs because they “didn’t want anything that would make us stand out as anything other than all-American.”
The cincuentañera, then, is a chance for women to celebrate a second coming-of-age, this time as the grown adults that they could only dream of being when they were 15.
In the course of a long life, the party lineup is awfully front-loaded: By the time a person hits 40, they may have celebrated a bat mitzvah or a quinceañera or a sweet 16, a prom, a graduation, and a wedding (or two)—cultural festivities where it’s socially acceptable to drop some cash and go all out. Later in life, the number of elaborate festivities dwindles. This distribution might have made sense for humans a century ago; in 1900, the average global life expectancy was only 32 years. Yet the average life span has more than doubled since then, leaving the second half of life starved of confetti.
Midlife also looks different than it used to for many women. In addition to living longer, American women are marrying later and delaying motherhood, if they choose to have children at all. After age 50, Cantú hiked Spain’s famed Camino de Santiago route five times; Calzada solo-traveled through Southeast Asia. Their lives don’t exactly square with patriarchal stereotypes of what older women might be up to, such as helping raise grandchildren or knitting sweaters in a Florida retirement home.
Physical shifts such as perimenopause fuel significant change in midlife. As my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote earlier this year, “The state of midlife, for women, is a kind of second (or third) adolescence, a coming-of-age identity crisis that roils with hormones and exploration and discontent.” Unlike the transition into adulthood, though, which boasts ceremonies galore, many women undergo this transformation with little social support or acknowledgment. Lacking rituals or jamborees, they might turn to a close friend, a journal, or a therapist to attend to the stew of feelings that accompanies any big life change.
That’s where the cincuentañera plays a role. Unlike most big celebrations in a woman’s adult life, the cincuentañera focuses on her individual accomplishments. “The milestones that mark the passage of time or social success for women tend to be those of child-rearing, tend to be those of marriage,” Rachel González-Martin, a Latino-studies professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Quinceañera Style, told me, referring to events like baby showers and weddings. Yet the cincuentañera is squarely about the person celebrating. It’s about a woman having “arrived at that which was potential at fifteen,” as Cantú writes in Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, a book she co-edited. At Cantú’s cincuentañera, for example, her three-tiered cake featured figurines of a graduate and a book, honoring her work as a professor and a writer.
The process of throwing oneself an extravagant shindig can itself be empowering. During a quinceañera, a 15-year-old might choose the flowers and the party theme, but older family members are most likely running the show and footing the bill. The cincuentañera, though, can be anything. Alma Villanueva, an Amazon Flex driver in Arizona, told me that at her cincuentañera, she danced not just with her father but with her mother as well. For Villanueva, the twist on the tradition was an opportunity to give both of her parents a public shout-out. When she took them out for a spin, she told me, “I didn’t want them to dance with me. I wanted to dance with them.” Calzada said that at her party, she also wanted to salute her relationships, and gave her loved ones tiaras of their own. “Watch til the end to see a sea of queens,” she captioned a TikTok video of her bejeweled attendees grooving to Bad Bunny.
The cincuentañera may be relatively new in the history of parties, but Calzada hopes it becomes a tradition—a ritual that future generations of women can cherish as they step into a new phase of life. She hopes her daughter celebrates both a quinceañera and a cincuentañera. She wouldn’t want her to miss out on one of the cincuentañera’s greatest gifts: the chance for a woman to dream up her remaining years with a freedom she didn’t have at 20 or 40—or especially at 15. “This wasn’t coming of age, because I’m entering adulthood,” Calzada said. “This was coming into a phase of my life where I’m finally living for myself.”
