Selena, and the City That Shaped Her

Selena Quintanilla was born in Lake Jackson, Texas, in April nineteen seventy-one, the youngest child of Abraham Quintanilla Jr., a former Tejano musician. Her father had big plans for his children. He started teaching Selena to sing when she was six, quickly understood what he had, and formed a family band with Selena on vocals, her brother A.B. on bass guitar, and her sister Suzette on drums.

The family was living in Lake Jackson when Abraham opened a Tex-Mex restaurant called Papa Gayo's. The restaurant failed in the early nineteen eighties, hit by the oil recession. The family declared bankruptcy and was evicted from their home. They moved to Corpus Christi in nineteen eighty-two and began playing rural dance halls and small clubs, working the South Texas Tejano circuit that ran through communities from San Antonio to the Valley.

Tejano is an accordion-driven music that pulls from conjunto, polka, cumbia, and country, and it was the soundtrack of working-class Mexican-American life along the Texas Gulf Coast. Selena sang it in Spanish despite growing up speaking English, because her father taught her the music first and the language came after. By the late nineteen eighties she was known throughout the Tejano world as la Reina de la Onda Tejana, the Queen of Tejano.

On March thirty-first, nineteen ninety-five, Selena was shot and killed at a Days Inn motel in Corpus Christi by Yolanda Saldivar, who had been the president of her fan club and the manager of her boutiques. Selena was twenty-three years old. The trial was held in Houston. Saldivar was convicted of murder in October nineteen ninety-five and sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after thirty years.

The Mirador de la Flor memorial on the bayfront seawall, dedicated in nineteen ninety-seven, draws approximately thirty thousand visitors each year. Many of them come from Mexico and Latin America on pilgrimages. The city and the music she made here are inseparable now.