Mirador de la Flor, the Pilgrimage Site on the Seawall

Three weeks after Selena Quintanilla was killed in March nineteen ninety-five, the mayor of Corpus Christi, Mary Rhodes, established a memorial committee. Selena had sold out the Houston Astrodome twice. She had been in the middle of recording her first English-language album, which would have been her crossover to the mainstream American market. She was twenty-three. The committee received proposals from artists and architects across the region.

The result was the Mirador de la Flor, the Overlook of the Flower, dedicated in May nineteen ninety-seven on the Corpus Christi bayfront seawall. The life-size bronze statue, sculpted by Corpus Christi artist H.W. Buddy Tatum, depicts Selena in a signature performance outfit: leather pants, a bustier, boots, and a jacket. She stands facing the bay, arms slightly extended, caught in the posture of a singer who has just finished a song or is about to begin one.

The seawall location is deliberate. The memorial overlooks the water that Selena grew up beside, in a city where she played her first shows in the early nineteen eighties when the family was just getting started. The monument draws roughly thirty thousand visitors per year, a large number for a single statue in a mid-sized coastal city.

Many of those visitors come from Mexico, from Central and South America, from the Mexican-American diaspora across the United States. For them the trip to Corpus Christi is something more than tourism. Selena crossed cultural lines that were genuinely difficult to cross in the early nineteen nineties. She was singing in Spanish in a country that did not fully acknowledge that world yet. The pilgrims who come to this seawall know what that meant.

The bay is still there. The statue faces it every day.