Quinceanera By Judith Ortiz Cofer

Coming of age stories have the ability to take a concept that most people experience but shape them into unique experiences. For example, Quinceanera by Judith Ortiz Cofer and The Ball Poem both discuss coming of age to the narrator but went on different paths to reach this conclusion. Both deal with symbolism and having a trigger of sorts to start the process to come to age but each poem has a way to dealing with the aspect that we have a to grow up.
In Quinceanera, the concept of growing up is surrounded by cultural lies. In Latin culture, the celebration of when a girl turns 15 symbolizes the transition to adulthood. In the poem, we see the narrator showing resistance to the act of growing up. She expresses her emotions by saying, “My dolls have been put away like dead children,” to put away her dolls who are not supposed to be “dead” to her. She needs to move on from any tangible objects that have any

Coming of age for him was something just like quincenera, uncontrollable. The narrator experiences the traumatic suicide of his father so he uses figurative language such as metaphors to convey the simplicity of life to a ball. His coming of age is through dealing with the loss of his dad and realizing that it's better to move on then dwell in the past. He compares life to a ball by saying, “People will take balls, Balls will be lost always,” meaning lives will be taken by others or themselves and eventually everyone will die with death being inevitable. The narrator throughout begins to realize that it's better to move on than keep remembering the past, especially with the topic of death, making his coming of age more on his terms. In the beginning, we know the narrator is facing uncertainty of his life because how jarring seeing his dad commit suicide is but he has a shift in thought which occurs at “Now he senses first responsibility in a world of