by Sid Holt
“Right now I’m kinda nervous because of all the stuff that’s going on,” Tami said, waving vaguely at her stomach. She ordered bone broth and a piece of chicken. “I don’t want to sound silly, but I try to get things organized because I’m a teacher, and I plan. And then everything goes to hell.” After decades of teaching middle and high school, she was teaching a class called Race in America at Texas A&M International University in Laredo but had gotten her classes covered for the week to handle the appointments, houseguests, and other tasks. The Martha Washington–themed T-shirts she’d ordered hadn’t arrived until eleven o’clock the night before, which delayed the arrangement of the welcome baskets she’d planned for the few dozen family members arriving from out of town to see her in the pageant. “So that’s running late. And then I had a mani, so my nails are done, and I have to be back at the Civic Center at three, because we’re putting on the dresses to see how they work onstage. And then we practice tonight with the dresses on.” She heaved a little sigh and took a sip of coffee.
Tami is gregarious and forceful, a short woman with wide blue eyes, a broad, friendly face, and the demeanor of someone who’s made a career corralling teenagers. Her hair was, for the moment, bright blond, which isn’t how she normally wears it. The stylist who does hair for the pageant wanted her to go platinum for Martha. (Martha’s hair was brown, but that’s not the point.) “I kind of like it,” Tami said, patting her head. “I think I might keep it this way.”
She wore a crisp white button-up embroidered with the blue crest of the Society. Across from her sat her childhood friend Carole, also a member of the Society, and to her right sat her teenage daughter, Bailey, who apologized right away for how much she would be yawning through lunch. She’d flown in from Florence, where she’d just started a semester abroad.
Most women are members of the Society because someone in their family was in it—a mother, an aunt—or because they’ve married into it. Tami’s husband’s aunt was a founding member, his father played George in 1987, and he played George in 2006. Tami, who is a joiner and naturally enthusiastic, was admitted into the group in 1998. Bailey began practicing the elaborate curtsy of the Martha Washington debutantes when she was three years old.
The number of members of the Society of Martha Washington is limited to about 250 at any given time, and openings are always outpaced by demand, so women are encouraged to apply for membership long before their daughters are of debutante age. For their first two years in the group, new members must sell fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of advertisements in the pageant’s annual program, which is the size, shape, style, and layout of a high school yearbook.
I asked the three women how they understood the Society’s role in the community more generally. Tami paused, chewing and thinking. “It’s interesting here because we’re such a Hispanic population. At least 95 percent. It’s really a Hispanic base, which is how the WBCA started. We were so Hispanic and so Mexican and so far away, located on the border—we were saying to America, We are American, and we’re going to celebrate Washington’s birthday! We are dual culture. We embrace our Mexican roots.”
This hadn’t been my understanding of the origins of the association—that it was started by Mexicans hoping to be brought into the feel-goodery of the American body politic—but as I was considering a next question, Carole chimed in, pointing out that, in her view, the crowning event of the Washington’s Birthday Celebration is something called the Abrazo Ceremony, which takes place the morning after the pageant, before the parade. Four children, a boy and a girl each from Laredo and from Nuevo Laredo, cross the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge from their respective sides, dressed in colonial-era costumes and accompanied by the mayors of their cities. When they reach one another in the middle of the bridge, over the waters of the Rio Grande, they hug.
“This whole celebration is about unification and friendship, especially with our neighbors to the south,” said Carole. “I think for you, knowing you,” she said, nodding at Tami, “the number one thing about this celebration is connection and family. I mean, for god’s sake, Bailey is here from Italy.”
Tami agreed. “I just think the connection and the continuation of the thing—”
Carole interrupted: “It’s roots. Not connection.”
“But what does a root do?” Tami asked. “It connects you to the ground. It connects you to the earth. It connects you to other people.”
Bailey nodded, looking at her mom. “It makes you a part of something.”
* * *
I spent most of the next two days in salons, particularly in the Regis Salon at the Mall del Norte, where Tami and a number of the debutantes were having their hair prepared for the various events of the weekend: the dress rehearsal, the pageant, the parade, the cocktail reception. When I arrived, the salon’s rather stern-looking owner, a woman named Grace, was in the middle of back-combing Tami’s hair sky-high. Blond extensions lay like coiled rope on a metal tray nearby.
Tami grinned as a greeting, careful not to move her head. Her iPhone was in her lap, and she was steadily fielding questions and handling minor crises from the various people needing her attention. She had arranged for her female family members who’d come in from out of town to have their makeup professionally applied for the occasion, but coordinating their schedules was proving complex. Next to Tami, a dark-haired, skinny sixteen-year-old named Sydney was further along—the young stylist working on her was already pinning her extensions into a pompadour. Sydney’s mother was negotiating with a makeup artist about the day’s schedule. I asked her what it was like to have a daughter presented.
She smiled. “It’s been a beautiful experience. She’s loving it: she gets pampered, she shines at the parties.” Sydney’s mom leaned forward to show me a picture of Sydney in her dress for the November father-daughter dance, one event on the slate of social obligations that precede the pageant. It was a long, white satin gown, off the shoulder. “It’s actually a wedding gown,” she said. “You have to buy a wedding dress. And because I have an older daughter, too, I now basically own two wedding dresses.” She laughed.
I asked if the Society paid for these appointments, since she was the Martha.
Tami shook her head and pointed at her chest.
“You pay for it.”
“Yes. The Society pays for—” She paused. “Nothing.”
“Not the dresses?”
“No, no. That’s why you’ll see all levels of dresses. They can get really crazy and be really reasonable just depending on what the person’s budget is. We have to sponsor our float in the parade. We pay for our tickets; we pay for our dress. There are yearly dues.”
“Are there scholarships for members who want their daughters to be presented but don’t have the money to do it?”
“No, no, no. No. No, they just either don’t do it or they borrow a dress. And some people will say, ‘We just can’t do it.’ If it comes down to either you’re gonna get a car or you’re going to college or you’re going to get presented, you don’t do it.”
I asked whether they had to wear a different outfit for every party.
Tami laughed. “Oh, yeah! And shoes.”
Bailey chimed in. “And hair and makeup.”
“And we bought ninety-five seats for friends and family.”
I did the math: that morning, I’d paid Tami two hundred dollars for a spare set of tickets to the pageant, ball, and cocktail party. Seeing the look on my face, she snorted in agreement.
“Head up,” commanded Grace.
I turned to Sydney. “What’s your favorite part of this?”
“Well, I really love the dress,” she said. “I’m really in love with it.”
“And what’s the hardest part?”
She gave a little sigh and said that the hardest part was wearing the dress. “The weight is on my hips and it’s more than sixty pounds,” she said. “It really hurts.”
* * *
Before I arrived in Laredo, I�
��d begun researching the local economy. While the city is one of the least white cities in America, a University of Toronto study named Laredo as America’s most economically segregated small city. In 2014, Laredo processed twenty billion dollars in trade with Mexico, but nearly 40 percent of the city’s population lives below the poverty line. Wealthy Laredoans live in neighborhoods like Plantation, Regency Park, and Lakeside. Poor Laredoans live in neighborhoods like El Rincon del Diablo and El Trompe. The per capita income in Laredo is $16,462, and the median household income is $41,403—which is, if your tastes run opulent, roughly the cost of a new dress for a Martha.
For the month of February, Texas A&M International University in Laredo loaned gallery space to the Society of Martha Washington for a museum of retired dresses. Between salon appointments, I drove over to have a look. The room was on the second floor of the fine arts center and shaped like a fishbowl. Several dozen mannequins stood silently in full regalia.
It was like standing among the discarded, gleaming exoskeletons of eighteen-year-olds as they existed throughout the twentieth century. I could see how short- or long-waisted the woman was, the set of her hips, the approximate fleshiness of her upper arms. One dress, with mint-green satin and aurora crystals, holds the shadow-body of Molly LaMantia, who was eighteen in 2011, and of her four older sisters before her. Another holds the echo of Evelyn Bruni Summers, a distant in-law of Tami’s, who in 1988 had thin wrists and sloping shoulders. An especially beautiful gown made of plum brocade with cap sleeves, held a girl who was uncommonly long-legged and slender.
Viewed up close, the dresses are more beautiful than they need to be. While it is a point of pride to have a dress that has been worn by many generations, mostly because it indicates a long Society lineage, it’s also customary to dramatically redesign an inherited dress for each new girl so it feels uniquely hers. This is a way of making sure a dress keeps up, as the gowns trend more extravagant and splendid each year. One series of photographs showed the transformation of a single gown as it was handed down through a set of five sisters: The oldest sister, Reina Ann LaMantia Cullen, had a pearlescent gown with large pink roses embroidered on the bodice and skirt; the next year, her sister Morgan changed the body of the dress to a sea-foam green and added a wide, tongue-pink ribbon; the third sister added a giant bow and replaced the sleeves; the fourth sister threw out all the pink and added olive-green velvet trim; the final sister tore off all the ribbon, added puff sleeves, and let the beadwork, which had been growing steadily more elaborate, shine for itself.
Each night, back in my hotel room, I turned on the television and was greeted by Say Yes to the Dress, which appeared to have been granted its own 24-7 channel by the state of Texas. Say Yes to the Dress is a reality show, based at a bridal boutique in Manhattan, that follows brides who are in search of “the dream dress.” In this search, they are stewarded primarily by a man named Randy Fenoli, who has an immaculately gelled crew cut. Randy credits his success as both a bridal-wear designer and bride handler to his former life as what was then called a “female impersonator” by the name of Brandi Alexander, who was crowned Miss Gay America in the 1990 pageant. Participating in drag pageantry, Randy once told a journalist, is how he learned to speak to women preparing to be on display.
The camera zooms in and out of fitting rooms, stockrooms, and the grand showroom, where women stand on pedestals in front of small committees of girlfriends or sisters or gay male friends or occasionally a father and almost always a mother. There is invariably one member of the committee deputized to have narrowed eyes and an unpleasant demeanor, and to say things like “I don’t think it’s doing great things for your ass” or “I think tuck ruffles are whorish.”
The show’s premise is that a wedding marks the most important day of a woman’s life, not because she’s going to marry the person of her dreams but because she is going to wear the dress of her dreams.
I love this show.
I wish I didn’t love this show. Women as creatures in pursuit of a princess fantasy or a supermodel fantasy; gay men as effete handmaidens to and quiet manipulators of straight women’s vanity; weddings as a performance of heteronormative habit and class aspiration and unbridled consumption … What a nightmare. Still, I can’t get enough of it, and part of the reason I love it is because I like to imagine what it might be like to be the woman in that dress. In this show, I see a path not taken, much as I see a path not taken in the pageantry of the debutante. I do not want to be her, and yet I like watching her pick out her gloves.
As a little girl, I was carefully combed and dressed, with bows in my hair that matched my outfits. I went to cotillion with my friends. I learned to fold my hands in my lap. I was enthusiastic about most of this, having been the kind of little girl who liked princesses and sparkly shoes. I enjoyed feeling pretty. I felt fancy eating crumbling grocery store cookies in white cotton gloves.
When I hit adolescence and the rituals of femininity became social requirements rather than play, I chafed against them, and my mother and I began to argue more over my appearance. By and large, women inherit their habits and neuroses about femininity from their mothers, and mine were inherited from my own Texan mother and, by extension, hers. The rituals of female beauty are deep-rooted in Texas, as is pageant culture—the desire to commodify the beauty of young women, and the sense that it is the moral duty of the mother to teach her daughter the rules of tasteful and advantageous self-display.
My mother is not the kind of woman who would enjoy Say Yes to the Dress, being both a self-proclaimed feminist and the person from whom I learned the devastating implications of the word ostentatious. (She also taught me the word gauche.) Her personal style was constructed as a rebuke to the big-hair-and-blue-eye-shadow stereotype of a Texas woman. Still, she is uncommonly beautiful—so much so that it’s often the first quality of hers people remark upon—and she has stewarded that beauty vigilantly, in part because I think she understands appearance as a reflection of both character and aspiration, an occasion to demonstrate not just beauty but intelligence about who you are and where you belong. She has since told me that she wanted to equip me and my brother to move comfortably and inconspicuously through any kind of social space—that’s why we went to cotillion. It was with that in mind that she dressed us as children.
As a teenager, I balked at learning to blow-dry my hair with a round brush, or at being told not to go out without earrings. I argued, citing all the times she’d told me that what mattered most was my mind and character, saying that I shouldn’t have to look pretty if I didn’t want to, that how I looked wasn’t the important thing about me. She argued that I should look “like I cared.”
Still, there was a sliver of time, when I was twelve, when I might have been a debutante. We had moved to Northern California, and in an attempt to make some friends, my mother let someone put her in touch with the local chapter of the National Charity League. My mother was skeptical from the beginning because, she said, societies like this were less about charity than about social climbing—a phrase that, because I was twelve, I needed her to define. Most mothers joined because they wanted to debut their daughters, which, she suggested, was a pretty antiquated and sexist ritual of declaring your daughter to be “on the market” to men. Nevertheless, she went ahead with our application, reasoning that she might be willing to deal with it if it would help us build a social life in this new place.
My mother had a phone interview with the mother in charge of the chapter, whose questions gave her the prickling feeling that having a last name like Garcia might be a stumbling block with the league ladies. Our application was refused.
* * *
They were breathtaking all together, and blinding, roughly a quarter of a million sequins and crystals catching the light. They looked more like a squadron of ships than of girls. Their traffic patterns were elaborate and cautious. The disembodied voice of the emcee would later declare to the thousand people watching out there in the darkness, to th
e mayor and his pretty wife, to the Texas senators who had traveled to see them debut, that they were “the best of Laredo.”
The enormous stage of the Jesus Martinez Performing Arts Complex had been arranged with backdrops painted with bursting, fecund cherry trees surrounding a Palladian manor house: Mount Vernon. Three tiers of risers led up to painted double doors, attended by two young pages, both outfitted in breeches and false ponytails clipped into their crew cuts. Before George, Martha, or any of the girls emerged, the bishop of the Diocese of Laredo prayed over the event, and the Junior ROTC band played the national anthem, and all one thousand audience members, dressed in their own best formal wear, rose and placed hands over hearts.
The most common form of pageantry in America is the beauty competition, but this show is a pageant more in the medieval or religious sense of the word. Medieval pageantry was like ritualized communal theater, put on seasonally or to celebrate particular saints’ days. This kind of pageant has plot, elaborate costumes, and a rank assigned to each participant, denoted by her place in the procession. (Historically, the closer you were to the king, the higher your rank; here, it’s about being close to George.) Medieval pageants held in honor of Corpus Christi reenacted the entire history of the world, starting with Genesis 1 and hauling all the way through to the Apocalypse. The 2018 Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant reenacted a fictional dinner party hosted by George and Martha in Mount Vernon with a party theme of, inexplicably, literacy.
The girls arrived one by one, in order of the status of their families within the Society. First came Andrea Victoria Gutierrez, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Gutierrez III. Andrea had been chosen to lead because her ancestral line within the Society is the longest and most distinguished, according to an elaborate and strictly maintained hierarchy: The girls with mothers who are members always come first, and within each group the girls are ranked in order of the length of time the family has been in the Society. Next come the girls whose connection is not through a mother but another female relative, subranked again in order of the date of membership. After them come two or three girls who have been invited as the Society’s “guests” for the year. It’s tradition to invite a girl from a neighboring city in Texas whose family has ties to the Society. It is also customary to invite a girl from Nuevo Laredo to debut with the Society. The non-Laredoan Americans are presented after the Laredoan girls; the Mexican girl comes last.