Selena Quintanilla started her debut recording in the ’80s, becoming an award-winning recording artist in the Latin music scene with albums like Amor Prohibido and Selena Live. In 1995, she was killed by the founder of her fan club. Her last album, Dreaming of You, was released posthumously in 1995.
Early Life of Selena Quintanilla
Selena was born on April 16, 1971, in Lake Jackson, Texas. Selena’s father, Abraham Quintanilla, was a former musician. He managed and produced his family’s group, Selena Y Los Dinos.
Selena grew up speaking English, but her father directed her to sing in Spanish to resonate with the Latino community. She memorized the lyrics phonetically at first and eventually learned to speak Spanish fluently. She started performing as a child.
Around the age of 10, Selena became the lead singer in her family’s band. The musical group started out playing weddings and clubs in their native Texas. The band featured her brother Abraham on bass guitar and her sister Suzette on the drums.
Selena was recognized as the “Queen of Tejano,” a type of Mexican music that united other styles, such as country and western. She was also sometimes referred to as the “Mexican Madonna” for her sexy outfits and dance moves.
Albums of Selena Quintanilla
Ven Conmigo (1990)
Selena’s 1990 album was the first Tejano record of achieving gold record status, meaning it sold more than 500,000 copies.
Live! (1993)
Selena became the first female Tejano artist to take home a Grammy for Best Mexican-American Album. Her album Live! hit No. 2 on the Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart.
Amor Prohibido (1994)
Selena and the band played various tour dates in New York, California, Puerto Rico, and Argentina in 1994. Amor Prohibido was released that same year and went gold.
Dreaming of You (1995)
Soon after the release of Live!, Selena went to work on the first English-language album that she hoped would put her on the top of the U.S. pop music charts. Unfortunately, she did not live to see its success.
Dreaming of You was released after Selena’s death and became a huge hit. The album hit number one on the Billboard Top 200 the week of August 5, 1995. That made it the first predominantly Spanish-language album to top the chart.
Popular compilation albums of Selena’s music include 12 Super Exitos (1994) and All My Hits Todos Mis Exitos (1999).
Songs of Selena Quintanilla
Selena saw seven songs hit No. 1, and 14 more songs hit the top 10 on the Hot Latin Songs Chart. “Dreaming of You” peaked at number 22 on the Hot 100 charts.
Selena saw seven songs hit No. 1, and 14 more songs hit the top 10 on the Hot Latin Songs Chart. “Dreaming of You” peaked at number 22 on the Hot 100 charts.
Other popular songs by Selena include:
- “No Me Queda Mas”
- “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom”
- “Amor Prohibido”
- “Tu Solo Tu”
- “I Could Fall in Love”
- “El Chico del Apartamento 512”
- “Que Creias”
- “Baila Esta Cumbia”
- “I’m Getting Used to You”
- “La Carcacha”
- “Fotos Y Recuerdos (Back On The Chain Gang)”
- “Buenos Amigos”
- “Dondequiera Que Estes”
- “Missing My Baby”
- “Siempre Hace Frio”
- “No Debes Jugar”
- “Techno Cumbia”
- “La Llamada”
- “Como La Flor”
- “No Quiero Saber”
Personal Life of Selena Quintanilla
Selena married Chris Pérez on April 2, 1992. The couple met and started secretly dating in 1990 when Pérez joined Selena’s band, Los Dinos, as the lead guitarist. They were married for nearly three years before Selena was killed in 1995.
Selena met Chris when he joined her band, Los Dinos, in 1990.
Selena’s older brother, A.B., recruited Pérez to join Los Dinos in 1990. In his 2012 book, To Selena, With Love, Pérez wrote that he was surprised by how the group was “adding unique sounds to Tejano music,” and most of all, by its lead singer’s powerful voice.
Selena was barely 18 years old when she met Pérez, who was about two years older. Pérez described them as being “polar opposites,” saying, “she was lively and outgoing, and loved being in the center of attention. Meanwhile, I quietly observed whatever was going on in the fringes.” At the time of their meeting, Pérez had a girlfriend—a biographical detail left out of the show.
Their romantic relationship started after a “fateful” trip to Mexico.
The relationship began with a Coca-Cola jingle—sort of. Selena’s partnership with Coca-Cola, Pérez helped co-write a lyric meant to sound like a Selena song. In exchange for the jingle, A.B. treated the band to vacation to Acapulco.
And that’s where the magic happened. A year into his time with Selena y Los Dinos, Pérez finally got to know Selena on a deeper basis. In Mexico, he wrote, Selena was “truly free to be herself.” They held hands for the first time on the plane ride home after hitting some turbulence.
Following that trip, their dynamic changed. “Our feelings for each other had begun to build after that trip to Mexico, despite the constant scrutiny of Selena’s parents and the their band members within the close quarters of the bus,” Pérez wrote.
They started seeing each other secretly and eventually confessed their feelings for one another. “We were in Laredo when we had our conversation about how we both felt the same way about each other. Selena had the biggest smile on her face when we were walking back to the bus afterward…I wanted to tell her, ‘Hey, quit smiling! You’re going to give it away,'” Pérez told Texas Monthly.
After a long build-up, Selena and Pérez had their first kiss near their tour bus (nicknamed “Big Bertha”)—and were caught by band member Rick. He warned Pérez that he was required to be careful or else Abraham would find out.
As Selena shows, Abraham opposed their relationship.
Abraham Quintanilla had a strong presence in Selena and Pérez’s young romance. In his book, Pérez explained that Abraham’s “word was law” for his family—and the law, for Selena, was no dating Chris.
Speaking to Texas Monthly, Abraham explained his opposition to Selena dating: “I saw him as a threat. What if they got married and he pulled her out of the band? All the work we did all those years would go down the tubes.” Pérez responded to those fears in his book by writing, “I was ready to support Selena in whatever she wanted to do. But he didn’t know that.”
The guitarist’s brush-up with the law and his party with the road crew, which he described in his book, probably didn’t help Abraham’s perception of Pérez. “He has nothing to offer you,” Pérez recalled Abraham telling Selena.
Selena and Chris had a secret wedding in 1992
After Pérez was fired, Selena was “miserable,” according to Suzette’s interview with Texas Monthly. Perez was enjoying being with family and friends: “It was odd, in a way, to find myself surrounded by people who loved me.”
The couple still met each other whenever they could. When Abraham caught wind of the relationship continuing, he made it more difficult for Selena to meet Pérez. In his book, Pérez described the moment Selena showed up at his hotel in Corpus Christi and said they had to get married to break the cycle. “‘There’s no other way. We have to elope,’” she said. Pérez resisted at first, citing the big wedding she’d always dreamed of. “‘That’s never going to happen, Chris,‘” Selena said.
Eventually, Abraham accepted Pérez as a part of the family.
He gave the couple one of the three houses he owned in Texas, and Pérez rejoined the band. “‘I’m sorry I pushed you kids into a corner,‘” Abraham said, per Pérez’s book. “‘Let’s just continue from here. We’ll go on doing what we were doing as a band, and we’ll move forward over this bump in the road.“
Death of Salena Quintanilla
Selena was shot and killed in Corpus Christi, Texas, on March 31, 1995, when she was just 23 years old.
Selena’s murder sent shockwaves through the Latino community, and her fans around the world grieved the singer’s passing.
Selena’s story of promise ended in tragedy. At the age of 23, Selena was murdered by Yolanda Saldívar, who had run her fan club.
Chris commemorated what would have been their 25th anniversary with a post on Facebook, and a photo of their marriage license. “Obviously, Selena’s impact on the world is still being felt today…as it deserves to be. Thanks for sharing your pictures of the event to my messages and on my timeline. On another note, it’s hard to believe that today marks 25 years since Selena and I decided that the only way to be together…was to run away and get married (at 20 and 22 years old) in secret,” he wrote.
Who is Yolanda Saldívar?
While Selena was alive, Yolanda Saldívar had a reputation for being her biggest fan. She uprooted her life for Selena.
In 1991, Saldívar founded the Selena Fan Club, and ultimately quit her job as a nurse to run the club full-time. In 1994, she was promoted to running Selena’s two boutiques in Texas, essentially becoming a trusted part of Selena’s life. According to an interview Saldívar gave with 20/20, Selena even called her “mom.”
But their relationship had a dark side. According to people who knew her, Saldívar was possessive—even obsessed—with Selena. “A woman who moved into an apartment with Yolanda discovered that Yolanda didn’t just have pictures of Selena on her walls—the whole place was ‘like a shrine,'” an article in Texas Monthly reads.
Martin Gomez, a fashion designer for Selena’s boutiques, shared an office with Saldívar and eventually quit his job because of her unhinged behavior. “She was very vindictive. She was very possessive of Selena. She’d get, like, very angry if you crossed her. She would play so many mind games, say people had said things they hadn’t said,” Gomez told The Washington Post. “So many things would happen to the clothing I was working on. I knew that I had finished a certain piece, but I would come back from a trip to New York and the hems would be ripped out. It was very strange.”
Soon, customers were complaining about unfulfilled orders. Turns out that not only was Saldívar mismanaging the boutiques—she was likely stealing money, too. Abraham Quintanilla, Selena’s father, found proof that Saldívar had stolen from the boutiques and fan clubs. The Quintanilla family confronted Saldívar about her actions on March 9. ‘I told her that I was going to go to the police and make an investigation for embezzlement,’ Abraham told UPI in 1995.
After that confrontation, Saldívar purchased a revolver. And on March 31, Saldívar and Selena met up to take Saldívar to the hospital. Saldívar alleged she had been the victim of sexual assault during a trip to Monterrey, Mexico. Then, the pair returned to the Days Inn, where Saldívar agreed to give Selena missing financial records.
While in Saldívar’s room, Selena was shot in the lower right shoulder; her main artery was severed. Selena fled the room, with Saldívar running behind her. She named Saldívar as her assailant before going to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival.
Saldívar was arrested following a nine-and-a-half hour standoff with police. “I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to kill anybody,” she said while holding a gun to her head, per the L.A. Times.
Saldívar still says that she shot Selena unintentionally.
To this day, Saldívar maintains that shooting Selena was an accident. “She told me: ‘Yolanda, I don’t want you to kill yourself.’ She opened the door. When I told her to close it, the gun went off,” Saldivar said while speaking to police investigators, per the L.A. Times. Saldívar retold the story during her interview with 20/20 News.
aldívar pled not guilty during her trial in October 1995, but the jury felt otherwise–likely agreeing with Abraham, who believed his daughter was killed in a crime of passion. “It was no accident,” he said on Univision’s Primer Impacto. “It was a moment of rage because she was being fired.”
After considering for two hours, the 12-person jury convicted Saldívar of first-degree murder.
Today, Saldívar is in prison.
Saldívar is currently serving her life sentence at the Mountain View Unit, a maximum-security women’s prison in Gatesville, TX. She’ll be eligible for parole in 2025.
Movie on Selena Quintanilla
Selena’s life story became the subject of a 1997 film, Selena, which stars Jennifer Lopez as the Tejano superstar and Edward James Olmos as her father. Lopez became the first Latina actress to take home $1 million for a movie role, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance.
Book, Lawsuit, and Series
Pérez wrote a book about his time with Selena, To Selena, With Love, published in 2012. He intended to make the book into a T.V. series.
In 2016, Abraham brought a lawsuit against Pérez for violating an estate agreement that Pérez signed shortly after the singer’s death that gave her father the independent rights to Selena’s name, voice, photographs, and story in perpetuity. Pérez lost his appeal in late 2018, and both sides agreed to dismiss the lawsuit the following May.
Netflix series on the story of Selena
Now that Selena: The Series, the Netflix show executive-produced by her 82-year-old father Abraham Quintanilla, has been streaming (it returns for its second season on May 4), it’s become even more apparent to viewers that they are only getting one side of the story.
Part one of the show kicks off with a larger-than-life scene of Selena (played by Christian Serratos) singing her iconic “Como La Flor” to an adoring audience, brother A.B. (Gabriel Chavarria) and husband Chris Pérez (Jesse Posey) behind her on the guitars and sister Suzette (Noemí González) being her badass self on the drums. Serratos may not resemble Selena — but who does? The scene itself and Selena’s passionate voice (lip-synced by Serratos) has complete soul to give any fan chills — but it all gets a bit less dazzling from there.
Legacy of Selena Quintanilla
The following of Selena’s music and persona has endured through the years. Selena was posthumously acknowledged with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on November 3, 2017, proclaimed “Selena Day” in Los Angeles by Mayor Eric Garcetti. That year, reality star Kim Kardashian West also dressed up as the Tejano singer as part of her homage to music legends for Halloween.
In February 2019, Texas State Representative Ana-Maria Ramos introduced a bill that would designate April 16, Selena’s birthday, as a holiday. That year, San Diego State University also announced plans to offer a new course, “Selena and Latinx Media Representation,” to start in 2020.
In March 2020, Selena became the first Latina artist and the ninth person to be inducted into the Star Trail of Fame outside the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
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