By Juan Montoya
We are reluctant to even approach this subject because it seems so naco to us that we didn't think that people on this side of the Rio Grande would be carried away by this turn of events.
We were, obviously, wrong.
What started out as a family invitation from the father and mother for "everyone" to attend their daughter Rubi's quinceañera was used by Internet pranksters to make it a worldwide web invitation.
After announcing which bands would play at the event, Rubí’s dad boasted that they would have a 10,000 peso chiva, an amateur horse race with a prize of 10,000 pesos to the winner. Oh, and he also invited – everyone – to the event.
Soon everyone got into the act through Facebook "memes" and the thing spun out of viral control. Pranksters began saying that Shakira, Los Indomables, and other major bands and personages – even the Pope – were going to attend. It was all a sham and Rubi's father clarified it saying that only the family friends of her town in San Luis Potosi were invited.
That didn't stop people from continuing the game. The Kotex Company in Mexico is said to have offered her 20 years of feminine care products,and other companies lined up to reap whatever economic or advertising profit they could get from the fabricated event.
Guess what?Just yesterday it was Brownsville folks' turn to make fools of themselves.
Rubi
and her parents were invited to Brownsville (By who? Who knows?) to ride the wave of their 15 minutes of fame.
Commissioners Ricardo Longoria and Deborah Portillo took a photo op with her and her parents and Portillo even threw in a few trinkets from her jewelry store as a gift. We have no idea what Longoria kicked in.
Then Jennifer's High-Tech Salon and Spa invited her clients over to her shop so they could take photos with them. We even heard that a car company in McAllen had donated a car to the family as a quinceañera gift for the girl.
But what is really distressing is that Ruby and her parents were invited to Perkins Middle School in the Brownsville Independent School District where they would give a talk on "culture."What started off as a joke has now blossomed into a brazen money-making enterprise that has even been allowed to enter our public school under the guise of teaching our school kids this mercantile type of culture.
Is it a coincidence that the local daily even has a story about some students in a local school helping out two students to celebrate their own quinceañeras independent from the Rubi phenomenon. We can understand commercial enterprises trying to glean some notice from the public by pandering to this type of naco Internet events, but to pass this off as cultural education in our civic government or public education institutions is drastically lowering the cultural bar for a meme laugh.