Selena: The Voice That Crossed Over and Then Was Gone

She was born in Lake Jackson, Texas, in April of nineteen seventy-one, the youngest of three children in a family with a musical past and a struggling present. Her father, Abraham Quintanilla, had been in a band in his youth. He saw something in his daughter's voice when she was a child and reorganized the family's life around it. By the time Selena Quintanilla-Pérez was eleven years old, she was performing professionally with her siblings as Selena y Los Dinos.

The DFW circuit was part of her road for years before the larger stages came. Quinceañeras, weddings, Tejano dance halls, radio promotion stops along the West Dallas and Oak Cliff corridors where the Mexican-American community had built its own entertainment infrastructure, largely invisible to Anglo Dallas. She was playing this circuit through her teens while becoming, by the late nineteen eighties, the best-selling Tejano recording artist in the country.

By nineteen ninety-four she was crossing over. Her record label was pursuing English-language recordings. Major mainstream labels were in negotiation. In February of nineteen ninety-five, weeks before her death, she sold out the Houston Astrodome. The Mexican-American community's relationship to her was not simply musical; she was the first mainstream cultural figure who looked and sounded like them and was being taken seriously on the terms of the broader industry.

She was twenty-three years old on March thirty-first, nineteen ninety-five, when she was murdered in Corpus Christi by the founder of her fan club.

"Dreaming of You," the English-language album completed posthumously from recordings she had already made, debuted at number one on the Billboard two hundred: the first album by a Latin artist to reach that position. In the Mexican-American community, the grief was seismic. The mainstream English-language press underreported it by almost every measure.