Eighteen years ago Sunday, I stood with my family in the kitchen of our San Antonio home listening to the radio report that beloved Tejano music superstar Selena Quintanilla Pérez had been killed.
The moment was both heartbreaking and confusing, a lot for a 5-year-old Selena fan to comprehend. I watched as my mother sat at the kitchen table and cried. Years later, I would understand what it meant to love an icon as a best friend and as a very important thread of my being.
Many people don’t know or understand the phenomenon of Selena, but to Mexican-American communities or anyone growing up in the South, hers was a presence that could not and would not be denied.
Born April 16, 1971, in Texas, Selena Quintanilla became known as the Queen of Tejano music and was one of the top Latin artists of the 1990s. She had 14 top-ten singles on the Top Latin Songs Chart and seven No. 1 hits. She swept Latin America and then broke through to the U.S.
Selena was shot and killed by the president of her fan club, Yolanda Saldívar, on March 31, 1995. Her funeral had 60,000 mourners. After her death, she was the first Hispanic singer to posthumously debut an album with both English and Spanish tracks at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 charts.
Everyone was in love with her, including me.
Today I have Selena nail decals, Selena books and a Selena background on my laptop. I post photos of Selena on my Facebook almost every week, and I’m pretty sure I’ve watched every YouTube video there is that has anything to do with Selena (Trust me, there are a lot). I even have a limited edition souvenir collectors Selena doll. When I listen to her sing, my spirit feels undeniable.
Call me a fanatic, but one with good reason.
Selena has been the most important cultural image to me since I was very young, and I know she has filled the same irreplaceable role for so many other Latina/os. She gave us a lens through which we could navigate and elevate the Latina/o experience.
As Edward James Olmos, the prominent actor who played Selena’s father Abraham Quintanilla in the 1997 film "Selena" put it, “She was the single most important factor in opening a lot of doors between the United States and Latin America of any single artist in the history of American culture.”
Because I was so young when her career was in full swing, "Selena" the movie and Selena the life tend to blend together for me.
The film was produced by Selena’s father and proved to be absolutely monumental. In the close years after her death, there were countless unauthorized books and film projects made about Selena, and the movie was a way for her family to preserve the truth of her memory. Selena's fans were involved every step of the way.
As the April 1996 episode of NPR’s "This American Life," titled "1,000 Women Become Selena" details, open casting calls around the country brought thousands of girls and women to audition for the part of Selena, many of whom traveled very long distances knowing they wouldn’t get it.
The crowd present at the re-enactment and filming of the Houston Astrodome concert scene, which was shot in San Antonio, was full of 33,000 real fans who were genuinely thrilled to live out moments of Selena’s life again.
The film makes me cry every time I watch it, and those tears and feelings come from a place that grows and changes as I get get older.
"Selena" isn’t the story of a pop star. It is the story of generations of Mexican-Americans struggling to understand and preserve their identities in a world that doesn’t always welcome us. It’s about knowing who you are and being true to it.
In her book "Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory," scholar and author Deborah Paradez argues that commemorations of the singer’s death have had a dramatic impact on Latinidad, or the idea of an “'Out-of-many, one-people' process through which Latinos or Hispanics are conceived and represented as sharing one common identity.”
Selena was the first image I saw of someone who looked like me who succeeded and truly connected with her community. She’s been one of the driving forces behind my pursuit of a higher education. She is fearlessness embodied. As a friend of mine said, she is how we learned to dance.
In Selena I see everything I could be and want to be, something good, fearless and talented. I know how important she’s been for me to look up to and what that kind of representation means for younger Latinas. She is how I learned to love myself. I feel an attachment to her that makes me want to be better for young people who may someday look up to me in that way.
I never met Selena. She was only 23 when she died, barely a year older than I am now. And while I never saw her in person, seeing her all around me continues to make a world of difference.
Reach the columnist at andrea.c.flores@asu.edu or follow her at @bowchickaflores
