rite de passage

Crossing borders has become a formal rite de passage toward identity, and Latin Americans are experts in dealing with the walls, fences and barriers of misreading — as Mexican, Hispanic-American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Caribbean and Latin American, not to mention Latino, mestizo, mulatto, Native and every other wall of misrepresentation.

To my surprise, however, my next rite de passage, national service, was quite different.

The title refers to a '50s bawdy house where six Florida youths search for sexual initiation, find humiliation, and then, by revenging themselves on its proprietor, achieve a sort of do-it-yourself rite de passage.

No doubt the idea was that the whole people were to be purified from all pollution of the past; it is what M. van Gennep calls a rite de séparation, the first step in a rite de passage.

It will need a long rite de passage before she can freely commune with this world again.