In 1995 Selena Quintanilla was the biggest Latin pop star in the United States. Not only for being the one that sold the most records, but also for representing the cultural rise of the Hispanic community, its integration into society and its commercial relevance. Selena was the symbol of a prosperous future for Latinos and that is why her death on March 31, assassinated by the president of her fan club, shocked that community in a collective trauma that came to be described as the Hispanic equivalent of murder. by John F. Kennedy. That tragedy, an almost passionate crime with the soap opera texture and the consequences of assassination, also revealed the tensions of coexistence between whites and Latinos in the United States. And he made Selena a myth despite the fact that, precisely, she had triumphed thanks to being an ordinary girl.
Arrarás explains in her book that Saldívar was not used to receiving affection like the one Selena offered her. Her room was covered in photos of the singer on an altar with candles and her friendship with the singer became more possessive, trying to distance her and put her against the rest of the workers on her team.
The Quintanilla family suffered the oil crisis that devastated Texas in the 1970s (an overabundance that devalued the value of fuel) and, after closing their Mexican restaurant a year after its inauguration, they hit the road to perform at weddings, baptisms and quinceañeras in exchange for food. Between the late eighties and the early nineties, Selena emerged as a star of Tejano, a regional Mexican music, despite being a traditionally masculine genre and not speaking Spanish. (Selena learned the songs phonetically. At that time, Mexicans considered Tejano artists the idols of the palurdos "pochos", a derogatory term by which they referred to Hispanics who did not know how to speak Spanish.)
In 1992, Selena's guitarist Chris Pérez declared her at a Pizza Hut and they secretly married without the approval of the singer's father. Abraham Quintanilla feared that Pérez's machismo would lead his daughter away from a musical career in which each album sold more than the previous one. Selena personified a new generation of Latinas who respected and vindicated her tradition but modernized her image. Her cowboy style, often with her abdomen exposed, presented her as a sexy, decent Hispanic girl integrated into American aesthetics. But its ethnic aspect was distanced from the impossible canon of beauty that the Mexicans tried to project (through their soap operas) in the North American culture with blond actors, of clear eyes and pale complexion. Selena was therefore nominated as a pop star acceptable to audiences of all races.
Yolanda Saldívar called Abraham Quintanilla fifteen times to authorize her to found Selena's official fan club. Saldívar carried out this work with such solvency and dedication that, by the time Selena named her manager of her Selena clothing line, Etc, she considered her one of her best friends. The franchise opened with two stores and beauty salons for Latina women, a demographic marginalized by the fashion and cosmetics industry that led Selena, Etc to report around 4.5 million euros in benefits. In 1994, Selena was the third Latin artist to make the most money in the United States. Forbidden Love , her fourth album, made Tejano music popular among young Latino Americans. (which went from being marginal folklore to occupying 52% of the Latin music market), got 36 platinum records and took Selena to fill stadiums with 80,000 people. So his label suggested that he jump into the Anglo-Saxon market with an English album. His fan club then had over 8,000 members.
"If Selena said 'jump!' Yolanda jumped three times, ”says presenter María Celeste Arrarás in her book El secreta de Selena to describe the passion with which Yolanda Saldívar, who left her job as an internal nurse for cancer patients, went out of her way to please the singer. Saldívar, who had a copy of Selena's house keys and her credit card to make arrangements, had no children, was not married, and claimed not to have time for boyfriends. The employees of Selena, Etc complained that although Saldívar was charming in front of the members of the Quintanilla family, she had an aggressive, hostile and intimidating attitude towards the staff behind her.
When the singer tried to flee, Saldívar shot her in the back and Selena ran to the reception leaving a 119-meter blood trail. Saldívar chased her, yelling "bitch." When Selena arrived at the reception, she fell into a pool of blood and spoke her last words: "Yolanda ... 158"
Throughout 1994, Saldívar fired 24 of the company's 38 workers because they did not like him. Selena's designer, Etc, Martín Gómez, also collided with her and informed Selena that the accounts did not add up, that there were too many unpaid bills and that Saldívar had destroyed several pieces of clothing minutes before a parade and had cornered to the dressmaker warning that he was either with her or against her. According to the book Selena: like Joe Patoski's flower , when Abraham Quintanilla warned his daughter that Yolanda seemed "an unstable and false woman", Selena reminded him that he had a habit of mistrusting people, like a couple of years she had previously mistrusted her husband Chris Pérez.
Arrarás explains in her book that Saldívar was not used to receiving affection like the one Selena offered her. Her room was covered in photos of the singer on a candlelit altar, and her friendship with the singer grew more possessive, trying to push her away and set her against the rest of the workers on her team. Saldívar went around saying that his dream was "to be like Selena".
Abraham Quintanilla discovered that Saldívar had embezzled more than 50,000 euros in forged checks from the fan club and from the stores, deposited by a certain Yvonne Perales who turned out not to exist. When Quintanilla confronted Saldívar with this information, she just stared at him without answering. But Selena couldn't fire her outright, because she needed her to resolve these accounting irregularities for a possible tax investigation. On March 10, 1995 Yolanda Saldívar was removed from Selena, Etc's bank account and replaced as president of the fan club. The next day, he bought a .38 caliber revolver.
Saldívar explained to the store clerk A Place to Shoot ("A place to shoot") that she was a nurse and needed to defend herself against the relatives of one of her patients who were threatening her. On March 14, he called Selena and asked her to meet her in a parking lot twenty miles from Corpus Christi, the Texas city where Selena had grown up and was still living (with no more luxuries than a red Porsche Carrera she was infatuated with, the singer was famous for continuing to eat tortillas and beans despite her wealth.)
When she got to the Saldívar parking lot she pulled out the gun, but Selena convinced her to get rid of it in exchange for keeping one of her jobs. So he returned the revolver to the store. During a trip to Tennessee to record songs from her next album in English, Selena demanded that Yolanda show her the proper papers for her accounts. On March 27, Saldívar returned to the store and bought the same revolver.
Three days later, Yolanda Saldívar moved into the Corpus Christi Days Inn motel and asked Selena to come to her aid because she had been raped, but to go it alone. The singer preferred to go with her husband. The next day, Saldívar again asked Selena to visit her, but this time not to come accompanied. Selena decided not to say anything to anyone, and at 7:30 in the morning, drove alone to the Days Inn.
Equating the death of a Hispanic star to those of other Anglo-Saxons like Elvis Presley, John Lennon or Kurt Cobain was a cultural milestone. The Latino community in the United States felt that their lives mattered
Selena took Yolanda to a hospital for examination, where doctors concluded that the patient was showing signs of depression and that her version of the rape was inconsistent. Upon returning to the motel room, the friends argued and Selena yelled at her that she could no longer trust her. Saldivar pointed the gun at her. When the singer tried to flee, Saldívar shot her in the back and Selena ran to the reception leaving a 119-meter blood trail. Saldívar chased her, yelling "bitch." When Selena arrived at the reception, she fell into a pool of blood and spoke her last words: "Yolanda ... 158", referring to the room number where her attacker was hiding.
The ambulance arrived a minute and 55 seconds later. When Selena was admitted to the hospital her veins were empty because the bullet had severed the subclavian artery and, although the protocol indicated that there was nothing to do, one of the doctors insisted that they try to revive her by means of blood transfusions against the objections of his father (was a Jehovah's Witness). 50 minutes later, Selena Quintanilla was declared dead.
When Yolanda Saldívar was detained in her car while on the run, she held her revolver against her temple, threatening to commit suicide. But after a nine-hour negotiation with FBI agents, he turned himself in assuring that his shot at Selena had been accidental. While Saldívar was under arrest, several members of Latino criminal gangs in Texas attempted to raise funds to pay her bail of € 450,000 so that they could murder her themselves.
The same day that Selena died, the police had to create a detour in front of the row of cars that were crowding to pay tribute to the singer. Street artists painted his face with graffiti on murals, cars, and buildings. Several people assured that the spirit of Selena had appeared to them to send "encouragement and hope for the poor" to her people. A rumor spread that the singer was alive and the coffin was empty, among the row of admirers waiting to watch her at her funeral, with such persistence that the Quintanilla family decided to open the coffin to avoid chaos: the 40,000 attendees were able to see the corpse of her idol, in a purple dress and lips and nails painted red.
The secretary of the fan club Esperanza Garza suggested in People magazine that the motives for the crime had not been economic, but sentimental: “If Saldívar had been fired, she could have returned to her job as a nurse, where she was doing very well. What I couldn't accept was the fact that I was never close to Selena anymore. ” Saldívar received the maximum possible sentence, life imprisonment, with the possibility of parole on March 30, 2025. He has been in solitary confinement for 25 years because several prisoners who admired Selena threatened to kill her and can only leave her 2.7-for-1 cell, 8 meters for an hour a day. His judgment was compared in media coverage to that of OJ Simpson.
The sensationalism surrounding the crime attracted the attention of mainstream media and Selena appeared two consecutive days on the cover of The New York Times . When the issue of People with Selena on the cover sold out two consecutive editions, the magazine published a commemorative edition (a tribute that People had only done twice, by Jacqueline Kennedy and Audrey Hepburn), whose success led to the founding of People in Spanish a few months later. The interview of María Celeste Arrarás with Yolanda Saldívar in the program Primer Impacto was the most watched broadcast in Spanish in the history of the United States.
Journalist Mario Tarradell stressed that Selena's death had "an unprecedented media impact for a Latino artist, since the general press often ignores people on the border." Although this unprecedented media repercussion was due to the melodramatism of the story, it did represent a cultural milestone by equating the death of a Hispanic star to those of other Anglo-Saxons such as Elvis Presley, John Lennon or Kurt Cobain. The Latino community in the United States felt that their lives mattered.
Two weeks after the murder, Texas Governor George W. Bush declared Selena Day in Texas on April 16 to commemorate her birth. Bush admired that the singer represented the essence of the culture of South Texas, a state that then had a 26% Hispanic population, but several Texans complained that Selena's Day coincided with Easter, showing their disagreement that acts, statues and altars to the singer were financed with her tax money. The Corpus Christi Caller Times newspaper claimed that many of the protest letters against the tributes to Selena contained unpublishable expletives. Nationwide, the news interviewed several citizens on the street wondering why there was such a stir for the death of a singer they had never heard of in their lives.
Video clip of 'Amor prohibited', one of Selena's most popular songs and the most listened to in 2020 on Spotify, with more than 70 million views.
It actually made sense that chance would integrate Selena into Easter. Churches in Latino neighborhoods were filled with pilgrims who prayed for her soul holding posters, flags and T-shirts in which Selena appeared dressed as a virgin and surrounded by angels. "Selena has been canonized, sanctified, and resurrected," analyzed Texas Monthly in 2010, "she has starred in a lavish Hollywood biopic, musical, and stamp series. In South Texas and beyond, he has risen from popular singer to something more ethereal: cult heroine, martyr, patron saint. Thousands of fans continue to make the pilgrimage each year to Corpus Christi, where his recording studio, home, clothing store, and headstone have become the Graceland of Texas. ” The ethnomusicologist Manuel Peña describes that on March 31 "it was as if the collective aspirations of the Hispanic community, personified in that beautiful but close and neighborhood sister, suffered as devastating an impact as the artery of the diva." That morning a woman and an artist died, but also a promise of a future for Latinos in the United States.
Finally Selena managed to succeed in her jump to the Anglo-Saxon market, although posthumously. In July 1995, her album Dreaming of You made her the woman who sold the most albums in a single day (175,000) and the only one with Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson to sell more than 300,000 copies in a week. Dreaming of You was the first album by a Latin artist to reach number 1 in the United States. Selena was the most successful Latin artist of the 1990s with sales of more than 60 million records and her collaboration with MAC (released after her death) was the best-selling celebrity cosmetic line in history. The movie Selena gave her protagonist, the then-unknown Jennifer Lopez, the record salary for a million dollar Latina actress.
López would become the greatest Latin icon in pop culture and she and Ricky Martin, Shakira and Enrique Iglesias released albums in English in 1999 with which they equaled and surpassed Selena's commercial milestones, reaching number 1 worldwide. But this boom in Latin music would have occurred with or without the death of Selena, and she would probably have led it herself, because the Hispanic population in the United States (which was in its third generation in the 1990s and already accounted for 10% of the total population) had been claiming its place in American culture for years. The beatification of Selena, whose face continues to parade today in Day of the Dead celebrations, gave the Latino community a cause, a myth and a symbol of pride. Selena's future was cut short, but that of her people was unstoppable.
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