How Mexico's Politicos Exploited a 15-Year-Old Farm Girl's Fiesta Andrea Noel - The Daily Beast
go to original January 1, 2017

Rubí, Mexico’s most famous quinceañera, looking forlorn in a sea of opportunists and a $2,000 dress (Marco Ugarte)

The violence-afflicted country, which two weeks ago solemnly marked one decade in its unending drug war, obsessed about a rural 15-year-old’s birthday party in what may have been the strangest quinceañera in Mexico’s history, and what certainly was the most talked about fiesta of the year.

Last Monday, as many as 60,000 people - including journalists from dozens of news outlets - travelled to the state of San Luis Potosí north of Mexico’s capital to celebrate Rubí Ibarra’s birthday, which was among the top trending stories on Mexican Twitter and YouTube, and dominated the national media’s news coverage.

It started as a joke, a viral meme that made the rounds for weeks, as millions shared Rubí’s father’s open invitation to the quinceañera, a celebration meant to mark Rubí’s passing into womanhood in her tiny, dusty hometown of La Joya, population 143, which survives mainly on the income from goats, beans, sheep, corn, and remittances.

“Everyone is invited,” he said in the video invitation on Dec. 1, sealing his family’s fate. To date there have been more than 4.75 million views.

But what started as a country cruelly mocking the rural birthday girl’s party, soon did a 180 as Mexico became the butt of its own joke.

Politicians and Mexican companies leapt over each other to get in on the meme, ludicrously one-upping each other as the month progressed until last Monday, when the unavoidable, all-consuming party was under way. And while the attention it got obscured dozens of more important news stories, in another sense the country saw nearly everything that is wrong with Mexico unfold in the story of Rubí’s bubbling, bumbling birthday celebration.

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