Viva Selena! How a murdered pop star gives hope to Latinos

On a sticky Sunday in August, more than 5,000 people are standing through sporadic torrents of rain to attend a free outdoor concert in New York’s Central Park. The event, Selena for Sanctuary, has been organised in response to the Trump administration’s severe policies on undocumented individuals, and the crowd has gathered to support immigrant-rights organisations such as Make the Road New York – all in the name of the pop star Selena Quintanilla.

Selena has been dead for nearly 25 years. The superstar was shot and killed in 1995, at the age of 23, by her fan club manager, Yolanda Saldívar. Yet at the concert, she seems more present than ever: drenched fans wear plastic bags and raincoats over T-shirts emblazoned with her wide, red-lipped smile. Others wore one-piece jumpsuits and jackets with gleaming rhinestones, nods to the sparkling stage outfits Selena would often make herself. From the stage, a parade of up-and-coming bilingual artists belts out covers of her classic cumbia hits: Mexican-American indie star Cuco offers his take on Bidi Bidi Bom Bom, dream-pop newcomer Ambar Lucid sings Techno Cumbia, and Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis performs Como la Flor. Their songs are a celebration during a turbulent time, reflecting how Selena still serves as a symbol of hope in the fight for immigrants’ rights.

Tributes to Selena have abounded in recent years. She is still a beloved celebrity in the US, referred to as the Queen of Tejano – a blend of folk and popular music that originated on the border of Texas and Mexico. In 2016, the beauty brand Mac launched a Selena-inspired makeup collection. When, in 2017, she was honoured posthumously with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a record crowd of 4,500 people gathered for the ceremony. Now Netflix has announced that in 2020 it will air “a coming-of-age story chronicling the singer’s rise”, starring Walking Dead actor Christian Serratos.

The contours of Selena’s story were set out in the 1997 biopic directed by Gregory Nava, which rocketed a little-known Jennifer Lopez to fame. The film follows Selena from her childhood in the Texan cities of Lake Jackson and later Corpus Christi, where she launched her career. Her father, the musician Abraham Quintanilla Jr, organised Selena and her two siblings, AB and Suzette, into a band that he managed. They performed frequently in his short-lived restaurant before finding fame at local carnivals, weddings and community events. By the time she was 18, Selena had recorded her first solo album – 1989’s Selena – and won the Tejano Music award for female vocalist of the year.

She had endeared herself to audiences with a disarming girl-next-door persona and a candid approach to straddling Mexican and American identities. Her vocals were almost entirely in Spanish, but Selena was honest about her struggles learning the language as an American from Texas. She did not shy away from the intricacies of biculturalism; instead, she discussed the challenges with tender sincerity: “I feel very proud to be Mexican. I didn’t have the opportunity to learn Spanish when I was a girl, but … it’s never too late to get in touch with your roots,” she said in an interview in Monterrey, Mexico, in 1994.

Selena’s jostling between transnational spaces is important to younger generations, particularly because, over the last decade, the Latino demographic has shifted from foreign-born immigrants to children born in the US and navigating dual worlds as Selena did. Her fashion aesthetic was also a source of inspiration: “There was no artist who dressed like her, especially somebody that looked like us and represented us,” says Doris Muñoz, the 25-year-old music manager and concert promoter behind Selena for Sanctuary. “A lot of us clung to that, because we saw ourselves in her.”

Onstage, Selena dazzled, embracing and challenging what people expected her to be as an artist performing in Spanish. At her unforgettable final concert in the Houston Astrodome, she arrived in a purple jumpsuit and launched into a seven-minute disco medley in English. She twirled along to cumbia melodies before breaking into lively choreography reminiscent of US stars such as Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson.

Through the Latin arm of EMI, which signed her in 1989, Selena released four studio albums and the concert LP Selena Live!, the latter winning her a Grammy for best Mexican-American album in 1994. The award helped to cement Spanish-language music in the US, and Selena’s place as the single leading woman in Tejano music. When she died in 1995, tens of thousands of people filed past her casket in Corpus Christi. The American Spanish language network Univision even stopped its programming to run footage of bereaved fans at the service. Four months later, her fifth studio album, Dreaming of You, came out and debuted at No 1 on the Billboard 200 – a first for a Latina artist that proved her reach across broad audiences.

Deborah Paredez, a professor at Columbia University and the author of the 2009 book Selenidad: Selena, Latinos and the Performance of Memory, notes that Selena’s catalogue drew on a range of Latin styles – something that helps explain why fans from such diverse Latin American backgrounds have united behind her. “There was an incorporation of Colombian and Caribbean rhythms … she really resonated across different points of identification or national affiliations.” AB, who was Selena’s producer, was aware of the blend the band was creating, saying in 1995: “They call us Tejano, and yes, we are from Texas. But a lot of the music we’re playing is from Mexico and South America [and is] a mixture of tropical, reggae, cumbia, all these things. It’s got pop influences to it, too.”

As Spanish-language pop finds renewed popularity today, Selena is still seen as a genre-crossing trailblazer: Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny has listed Selena as the icon with whom he wishes he could have collaborated, and artists from Gloria Estefan to Becky G to Leslie Grace have performed her music. AB’s son, Svani Quintanilla, is now a DJ, Principe Q, and has continued his relatives’ tradition of pushing cumbia music forward by mixing it with hip-hop beats. “They were making songs that were unheard of,” he says, pointing to the example of the cumbia-meets-electronic hit Techno Cumbia from 1994. “That was decades ahead of its time.”

Muñoz was thinking about Selena’s enduring legacy when she started Selena for Sanctuary in 2017 to raise money for her own parents’ citizenship proceedings. She has since expanded the benefit into a broader series that champions not-for-profit organisations fighting for immigrants’ rights. For her, it made sense to centre on Selena. A Mexican-American, Muñoz has been a fan of the singer since she was a child – her family told her that she burst into tears at the age of two when Selena’s death hit the news – and as a concert promoter, she had noticed that people “flocked” to the singer’s catalogue of upbeat, danceable hits, regardless of their age or which part of Latin America they or their families were born in. “There was that unifying factor – everyone loves her music and sees her as an inspiration.”

Paredez points out that Selena’s music was “definitely not overtly political”, but fans have still connected her death to their own grief in times of struggle. As she notes, shortly after Selena’s death, laws were passed to expand the grounds for deportation and reduce eligibility for welfare benefits, with severe implications for people in low-income, Spanish-speaking communities. This mid-90s legislation coincided with attacks on bilingual education and debates over Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that prohibited undocumented immigrants from using non-emergency healthcare in California (it was later ruled unconstitutional).

“Having [Selena] killed during that time holds her in this space of potential unrealised,” says Paredez. “Immigrants who are making their way and trying to provide better lives for their children – that’s nothing if not about a potential that then gets unrealised when they are deported or threatened.”

More recently, Donald Trump’s presidency has left many immigrants feeling more fearful than ever. A “zero-tolerance” policy initiated at the border resulted in more than 3,000 children being separated from their parents; their tearful voices went viral in audio footage recorded by journalists in 2017. Trump has used the words “invasion” and “animals” to discuss migrants from Latin America, terms that sounded even more horrifying after a man opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 people and later confessing to authorities that he was targeting Mexicans.

In such an atmosphere of violence, some Latinos have used cultural totems as an escape, and Selena is among the most powerful: a pillar of hope for Latinos, eternally youthful and ready to brighten darker times, even for just a moment.

“Her music just brings joy to everyone in the community,” says Muñoz. “A Selena song comes on at the club and everyone’s immediately singing all the lyrics, and grabbing their friends, smiling in each other’s faces. With everything that’s happening in our country, we deserve these moments of joy.”

In addition to Selena for Sanctuary, other efforts have tied her legacy to activism: Topfoxx, a New York City-based sunglasses startup, gave proceeds from a set of Selena-themed glasses to benefit children held in detention centres; a news conference decrying family separations was held in front of her memorial statue in Corpus Christi.

Younger artists invoke Selena’s name when they talk about using their platform to uplift others. Jackie Cruz, who plays Flaca in Orange Is the New Black and is also a singer, released her debut album, Hija de Chavez, in October. She won attention as a vocalist after she covered Selena’s Como la Flor in 2017, and she says Selena has been a role model. Cruz has spent time protesting outside detention centres across Texas. “I want to be a leader in the community like she was,” she says. “She taught us how to lead and how to give back and how to represent, and I want to build on that.”

Svani remains a frequent fixture at Selena-themed charity events and parties, and he joined Muñoz’s efforts at Selena for Sanctuary to stay involved with the community. From the stage, he watched the crowd swell with joy as they danced to his late aunt’s music. “If she was here, she would be doing all of this,” he said. “I feel like she would be at all of these events. She would be using her voice for good.”