Selena: Tejano's Last and Largest Moment

Selena Quintanilla was born on April sixteenth, nineteen seventy-one in Lake Jackson, Texas. She was performing with her family's band by the age of ten. By her early twenties, she was filling the Houston Astrodome with crowds of sixty thousand people and had become the most commercially successful Tejano musician in history.

She was twenty-three years old and in the early stages of crossing over into English-language pop when, on March thirty-first, nineteen ninety-five, she was shot and killed by Yolanda Saldivar, the founder of her fan club, at a motel in Corpus Christi. Saldivar had been managing Selena's boutique clothing stores and had been embezzling from them. When Selena confronted her, Saldivar shot her.

Selena died before she reached the hospital. Her posthumous crossover album, Dreaming of You, debuted at number one on the Billboard charts, the first Latin album ever to do so.

The San Antonio and Austin venues where she had performed on her way up were part of the circuit that built her. She represented a music, working-class, Spanish-language, accordion-rooted, deeply Texan, that was and is at least as historically rooted as anything produced in Nashville. She had not yet finished what she was going to do.

Her story is also a story about violence against women in contexts where celebrity strips away the protective anonymity ordinary people rely on. Saldivar had been given access, trust, and proximity because Selena trusted her. The music Selena left behind, particularly for the communities who claimed her, carries a weight it should not have had to carry.