25 years after her death, fans remain devoted to Selena
MONICA Peralta has been a fan of Selena since she was in diapers. Her father used to play Selena’s songs to calm her down.
“I even have home videos where I’m in my crib and I’m listening to her and watching her on TV. So, I would say my whole life, I’ve always known about her,” Peralta said.
Tuesday marks the 25th anniversary of Selena’s death, and Peralta, now 26, remains a fan and even maintains a tribute YouTube channel where she demonstrates how to re-create some of Selena’s most iconic stage outfits. Selena started singing when she was about 10 with her family’s band, Selena Y Los Dinos, playing weddings and clubs. She continues to draw a fanatical fan base, especially among Latinos like Peralta who continue to see the Tejano superstaras one of the few examples of representation in US pop culture.
“I felt that she was very easy for me to connect to because growing up, she was one of the only people that I could really see myself in,” said Peralta, who lives in Paramount, California. “... She was a young Mexican American Latina who was also struggling with Spanish and just trying to be successful in life.”
While Selena Quintanilla drew a large Latinx fan base before her death at age 23, she didn’t enter the mainstream pop music until her 1994 Grammy win for her album ‘Live.’
Her murder in 1995 by the manager of her fan club, Yolanda Saldívar, came just as she was poised to cross over to the Englishspeaking market. Saldívar is currently serving a life sentence. Selena’s last album, ‘Dreaming of You,’ topped the Billboard 200 in 1995. The 1997 biopic starring Jennifer Lopez catapulted Selena into fame posthumously. In the subsequent years, the Latinx community hasn’t forgotten her. Instead, they’ve passed on her music and their fandom like a family heirloom.
So what is it about Selena that she has left
behind such a lasting legacy?
Roger Gomez of Santa Ana, California, became a fan when he was 16, after being moved by news coverage of her death. He created a chat group to speak with other fans, which turned into a website, LoveSelena.com and eventually fan pages on Facebook and Instagram.
Gomez, now 41, said he sees Selena’s fan base growing ‘every single day.’
“Now that we’re getting to the age where we have kids and are starting to have grandkids, we’re passing on to that generation the love of her music and everything that we’ve known about Selena throughout the years,” Gomez said.
Selena remains prominent decades after her death partly because the music industry has not seen a star quite like her since. Deborah Paredez, a professor of ethnic studies and creative writing at Columbia University, explored the artist’s impact in her book, “Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. In many ways, Latinos, even though we’re hyper visible, we’re also deeply underrepresented in mainstream culture,” Paredez said.
“There hasn’t been another Selena. In some ways there could never be. But I think people are yearning for that kind of more robust representation.”
Selena, born near the US-Mexico border, embodied the Latina girl next door. She drew from both her father’s traditional Tejano musical style and pop music to create her own distinct sound.
Also like many Latinos born in the United States, Selena spoke English as her dominant language, which was clear in interviews with Spanish-language media, in which she sometimes stumbled to find the right words.
“Owning her kind of Spanglishspeaking ways was something that was very affirming for so many of her generation,” Paredez said. Selena’s sense of style also rang true for Latinas. In the ‘90s, when the norm was for pop stars to have rail-thin figures, Selena wore outfits – like her purple bodysuit and rhinestone-studded bustier – that accentuated rather than played down her curves. — The Washington Post