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Prior research has examined the quinceañera’s role in Hispanic female adolescents’ identity development processes, but few have examined the quinceañera as a site of group-level continuity and change whose relevance persists in a post–Great Recession economy. This gap in the family science literature reflects a larger epistemic shortcoming stemming from the field’s use of White mainstream family processes as the reference from which to operationalize normative family values, attitudes, and behaviors. Using historical and demographic data in tandem with contemporary literature on the consumptive behaviors of Hispanic families, we conceptualize the quinceañera as a consistently symbolic, yet flexibly enacted ritual performed by diverse U.S. Hispanic families as they co-construct family identity against the backdrop of changing immigration patterns, fertility rates, and financial practices.

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Few studies have examined how Mexican-origin mothers experience epistemic harm irrespective of its impact on childrearing. Clinicians and researchers can benefit from understanding how public narratives of (un)belonging influence the development of Mexican-origin mothers’ knowledge construction and identity as knowers. We used Chicana decolonial feminisms to examine the epistemic experiences of seven Mexican-origin mothers in the US–Mexico borderlands during a period of heightened racist, nativist, and anti-family violence. Participants between the ages of 22 and 51 years completed in-depth semi structured testimonio interviews in Spanish, English, and Spanglish, an admixture of both English and Spanish common among bilingual Americans of Mexican descent. Epistemic experiences were intertwined with crossing, bridging, and the liminality associated with navigating diverse citizenship discourses as gendered, racialized knowers. Three themes were identified including brown-on-brown conflict, discrimination denial, and co-family as sources of new knowledge. Participants experienced epistemic harm from expected and unexpected sources, including within-family invalidations that were especially disorienting. Epistemic growth arose from relational, integrated co-construction of new knowledge, but epistemic harm also appeared to cultivate internalized nativist fears in some participants.