This tale may be the better for its improbability.
A quinceañera is a Latin American Spanish word for a girl who becomes the marriageable age of fifteen years—quince años. The term also refers to the coming-of-age party that Latin American families have for their daughters (and sometimes for their sons) when they turn fifteen. This is a New World tradition celebrated in various ways in different countries and regions.
In this story, Magdalena (Emily Rios) is the daughter of Mexican-American evangelical preacher Ernesto (Jesus Castaños-Chima) in East Los Angeles. Magdalena is about to turn fifteen in the shadow of her more affluent, popular, and prettier cousin Eileen (Alicia Sixtos).
In the midst of the party preparations, Magdalena, a ‘good girl’ who minds her parents, discovers that she is pregnant even though she is technically a virgin—she has a boyfriend with whom she engages in heavy petting, but she has never been penetrated and her hymen is unbroken—an unusual but not impossible gynecological occurrence.
The ensuing uproar at home forces her to move in with her Tío Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez), a kindly, eccentric 85-year old great uncle who lives in a small rear house with a large garden in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood. Another of Magdalena’s cousins, Eileen’s older brother Carlos (Jesse Garcia), a tattooed and gay black sheep also shunned by his parents, already lives with Tío Tomas. 
The narrative gels by contrasting people who seek security by conforming to conventional ideas of conduct and behavior with those who do not fit in and must find guidance, consolation and fulfillment in their own way. The contrast is the more marked in a partially assimilated immigrant community.
Eileen and her friends are absorbed by the ritual and forms of the quinceañera, the right dress, the right guests, and whether there will be a Hummer limousine, while Magdalena must deal with the quickening fact of becoming an adult.
Carlos’ father, whose intense anger toward his son reflects the shame he feels in his community because his son is gay, bars the young man from the family home and social events where family and friends get together such as his sister’s quinceañera. But Carlos does not fare much better among the affluent and educated gay white neighbors who live around his uncle in Echo Park, whose patronization just makes him aware of his equally low status in the gay community. Carlos comes to realize that he can choose his own community of the people he loves and be the father he wishes he had to someone else who needs a father.
Tío Tomas is a quietly tolerant, empathetic, even saintly figure, especially in contrast to Magdalena’s proud and self-righteous preacher father Ernesto, too headstrong and unimaginative to see his daughter in a predicament not unlike the Mary of his scripture.
The story wends engagingly through an extended Latino family and a cross-section of people in an old city neighborhood ‘in transition’, that is, affluent white ‘gentry’ displacing lifelong ethnic residents. Though for perspective on this ‘transition’, it is curious to note that Audrey Totter’s evening walk a half century before in The Set-Up goes through the same neighborhood.
Like life, this story takes several twists and turns to get to the point; it does so in a poignant if sentimental way.
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