From the Archives: Selena: A Star Dies and An Icon Is Born
A mural of Selena Quintanilla performing at the Houston Livestock & Rodeo show at the Astrodome in 1995. Used under Creative Commons license. Photographer: NoNoJoe/Flicker
San Antonio Current | Nov. 2, 1995
Near downtown San Antonio, at the boutique once managed by her killer, throngs of fans gathered to mourn, genuflecting before the closest thing they had to a shrine.
A candlelight vigil at Sunken Garden Theatre brought the devoted and the curious together.
Selena, who in life had been dubbed the “Tejano Madonna” had in death become closer to the Madonna, an idol whose ascension from singing star to spiritual icon happened so quickly that few could comprehend and even fewer questioned. She belonged to her people in a way not unlike Elvis belonged to others, and now that she was dead, her memory was theirs to preserve, to honor, to cherish. While the masses struggled to express the depth of her meaning to themselves and their culture, others quickly grasped what she embodied in eloquent, if somewhat overwrought, soliloquies. “The things that Selena protected were not the things that fall because of gravity,” wrote Boston Globe staff writer Alisa Valdes of the singer’s effect on young Latin women. She caught the things that float in the air just before these young women speak, the things that choke them when their mouths begin to form a sound.” Of her Judas, the impish Yolanda Saldivar, Valdes posited that “It’s possible that Saldivar pulled the trigger like a jealous lover. If I can’t have you, I am no one.”
Surely these emotions might have puzzled, even astounded, the 23-year-old entertainer who walked among us as if — save her infectious incandescence — she was no different from the rest of us; she shopped at Target, she ate at Pizza Hut, she sang innocuous ditties such as “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.” But what of the things that made her extraordinary behind her talent and celebrity? She was sexy, but playfully so. She was the product of a devoutly religious family, though outwardly she exuded no piety. She was married, too, but there was never any hint of marital woes or scandal, even while she appeared accessible. No, Selena Quintanilla-Perez would have never imagined the religion that was poised to celebrate her in death if only because death was unimaginable. However implausible it might have seemed in the days before March 31, in the reverie surrounding her passing something quite remarkable, if not ironic, befell Selena: as she crossed from the mortal world, even before realizing her mortal dreams, she became immortal — Selena, the Virgin of Corpus Christi.
Selena wasn’t perfect, but she was close. Although she is often remembered for her vocal support for education, she herself left school early to pursue her career. While she embraced the teachings of her religion and the importance of family values, Selena eloped to marry her guitarist, Chris Perez. What she was, in life and in death, was larger than life, and her mere being went far beyond her considerable musical talent.
“She, of course, became bigger than life after she was assassinated,” says Dr. Ruben Candia, who teaches a course at St. Mary’s University called Mexican-American Culture and Life. “She wasn’t Catholic like many of her fans [Selena was a Jehovah’s Witness], but her contributions overshadowed religion. She always took time out to talk to kids, she was a very nice young woman who was a very good role model. I always found the comparison with Madonna [the singer] troubling. There were no similarities; her life was not scandalous.”
What Selena represented most, says Candia, is a concept he calls “Paradise Lost,” in which Latinos desire to recapture a paradise sometimes related to them in the mythic culture of the Aztecs. “When you see something or somebody doing so well, you tend to create an image you want to keep forever. That’s what’s behind the idolatry, that and the custom to not want to forget.”
What endured Selena — and elevated her in death to near sainthood — to almost everyone she came in contact with, from neighbors to strangers, fans, musicians, and media types, was an incomparable radiance. She was, to speak with people who knew her well and those who had barely known her, perhaps one of the nicest people to walk the face of the earth. “I remember when I would call her up early in the morning as part of a prank,” recalls disk jockey Johnny Ramirez of top local Tejano radio station KXTN-FM, “and she would always be in a good mood. She had this great laugh — even if something she said wasn’t that funny, you found yourself laughing along with her.” As for the fanatical devotion of her fans, Ramirez recites another familiar quality repeated by those who knew her: “She was us,” he says, speaking of the second, third, and fourth-generation of Mexican-Americans he calls Tejanos. “A child of Mexican-American parents who grew up listening to American music but still loving her own culture.”
Selena had also defined the word “crossover.” Like a lot of Tejanos, Ramirez says, Selena had to go back to reacquaint herself with her culture. “She had to go back and relearn Spanish and rediscover her culture. Like a lot of us, she had put it on the backburner.” Selena did so with a zest. As Ramirez and others attest, her first few brushes with the Spanish-speaking press were near disasters. “In one of her early interviews, her Spanish was quite bad,” says Ramirez. “In one of her last, it was eloquent. That was the kind of person she was. She worked as hard off stage — in the way she led her life, her family values, and the fact she wanted to get back to her culture — as she did onstage.”
But her appeal had more than language at its core.
“She was not just a Latin Star, she was an American star, the first person many Latina girls had to look up to,” says the Boston Globe’s Valdes. “She wasn’t a victim, like in the novellas, she was a gutsy, confident, happy woman.”
“The hero worship is understandable,” says San Antonio Express-News columnist Carlos Guerra. “A lot of people feel that they knew her personally. For as young as she was, she had been performing for a long time. When I was in Corpus [Christi] recently, I ran into three different people who said they had met her in Wal-Mart and Target. She was that accessible.”
People identified with Selena in another way as well, says Guerra: “She was making it, and about to make it in other markets. That was just real obvious. There are huge cultural differences not only between the crossover from the Tejano market over to the English-language market, but between Tejanos and the Mexican-American people in California and Florida. In California, the music is much more ‘she-boop, she-boop.’ She crossed over that. In Miami, where the population is Cuban, she was the lead act at the Calle Oche festival and she crossed over, she knocked ‘em out.”
As if to underscore her phenomenal impact, the legend of Selena will enter the canon of academia next year as part of the music segment of Dr. Candia’s course.
“Her crossover is very, very real,” says Candia. “It’s more than just music, it’s about acceptance of the culture, that it is part of mainstream America. Just as it is to blacks, it’s very important [for Mexican-Americans] to be considered part of Americana.”
In a recent New York Times Magazine cover story titled “ELVIS, HEALER,” a photograph of the Vegas-era rock ‘n’ roll god is framed in an arch, laced with flowers as a dozen candles burn at an altar. “He had fans. Now he has followers,” reads the subtitle. What was once rock-and-roll has become a redemptive faith.”
The article details the author’s pilgrimage to Memphis, Tennessee, to experience first-hand the religion of Elvis Presley as it unfurls during “Death Week” ceremonies each August. What writer Ron Rosenbaum found in the heart of Elvis Country — a coveted American folk ritual born of a longing for spirituality and a lust for celebrity worship — was that in death, Presley had “transcended the camp ridicule, the kitschy condescension, the hostile tell-all bios,” and that “The pilgrimage to Graceland had become a way for all kinds of Americans to come to terms with all kinds of pain and loss.”
The similarities between the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Queen of Tejano are as obvious as they are strikingly different. As many Americans deify Elvis, evoking a Jesus-like figure whose suffering gave birth to a culture seeking redemption, Selena is seen by many as a symbol of hope and a beacon of a brighter future for all who heed her example. Unlike the cult of Elvis, the cult of Selena exposes a great cultural divide. In death, says columnist Guerra, Selena gave a face “to a people that nationally didn’t exist before.”
The altars and shrines, the pilgrimages to her home and graveside, the religious aura surrounding Selena are, says KXTN’s Ramirez, a natural part of Mexican-American culture. “The religious connotation is appropriate,” adds reporter Valdes. “Culturally, dealing with the death of people involves idol worship.”
“The music speaks for itself,” says Joe Nick Patoski, senior editor at Texas Monthly and author of a forthcoming biography of Selena. “There’s no doubt she took Tejano to a higher level. As far as her legend growing after her death, consider the culture. There are not many role models if you’re Mexican-American, particularly if you’re a young Latin female, they’re few and far between.” The enormous interest in Selena, both in the Latin world and mainstream America, says Patoski, is predicated by the circumstance of her death. “You’ve got a lot of James Dean and Buddy Holly aspects,” he adds. Moreover, when you put the Latin aspect to it, it becomes far more compelling than the loss of any American rock ‘n’ roll hero. All those events were tragic, but tell me one more tragic than dying at the hands of your number one fan.”
“Her legacy,” adds KXTN’s Ramirez, “is going to be that of a very talented individual who, for a brief instant, gave us something to look up to. This is what you can be if you study and work hard enough. If people continue to use her like that, her music is going to be around forever. We can use her, hopefully, to bring up the future of America, our kids. The sad part is, of course, that she was taken just as her rocket was about to take off.”
The cult of Selena, says Patoski, has no end. “Set the music aside, and look at some of the other South Texas saint and see how long they’ve lasted. This can go on for at least as long as the people living today, and will quite likely be an inspiration for generations to come.”
On a warm, sunny October afternoon not much different from the Spring day of Selena’s funeral seven months before, several hundred people gathered on a cordoned-off street on the banks of the San Antonio River. In front of the Hard Rock Cafe, where Selena had performed in January, the faithful and the curious and the media milled, awaiting the latest offering at the altar of the church of Selena. There, the father, the husband, and the Holy Ghost gathered to emboss her name on a star that would both inaugurate the cafe’s “Walk of Fame” and correct the indignity of having been denied a similar tribute in Hollywood.