Cameras flashed and reporters crowded around 15-year-old Isela Anahí Santiago Morales as she stepped from a vintage car into the pouring rain. Her friends formed a cordon so she could make it to the stage.
The daughter of local garbage collectors, dressed in a voluminous pink gown, looked both overwhelmed and exhausted.
Just six weeks earlier, Isela’s quinceañera – a traditional coming-of-age celebration in Latin America that marks a girl’s 15th birthday – had gone almost unnoticed. Her parents had prepared food and invited friends, but, she recalled, “Some didn’t come. My dad said we couldn’t let the food go to waste, so he posted on Facebook that we had enough left for 40 people.”
That simple post transformed her life.
Isela lives with her parents and sister in a modest wooden house with a tin roof in Axtla de Terrazas, a town of about 32,000 in the central state of San Luis Potosi. Her mother is of Nahuatl heritage and her parents earn a living collecting garbage. They had stretched their savings to host a small party on July 9.
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