Before she turned nine years old, a pretty Texas girl named Selena Quintanilla Perez was already singing at roadhouse dance halls and weddings, purveying a bright, up-tempo version of traditional Mexican-American border music. A little more than a decade later, she was the Grammy-winning queen of the booming “Tejano” music market, playing to crowds of 60,000 and selling more than 1.5 million records in the U.S. and Mexico. “Never in my dreams would I have thought that I would become this big,” she told TIME in a recent interview. “I am still freaking out.”
On Friday, two weeks shy of her 24th birthday, the singer, now known simply as Selena, was shot to death in a motel in Corpus Christi, Texas. The accused assailant was a former employee, Yolanda Saldivar, 32, who once headed Selena’s fan club and later ran a boutique owned by the singer. Saldivar was arrested after a nine-hour standoff with police in the parking lot of the Days Inn. The only explanation offered for the killing came from Selena’s father, Abraham Quintanilla, who suggested that Selena’s meeting with Saldivar at the Days Inn was about financial irregularities. “My daughter Selena was killed this morning by a disgruntled employee,” said Quintanilla. “There were discrepancies with the fan club, and they resulted in the shooting of Selena.”
The news of her death was a bitter blow to many Texans, especially Mexican-American youths, for whom Selena had become both an icon and a role model. She was the embodiment of young, smart, hip, Mexican-American youth-wearing midriff-baring bustiers and boasting of a tight-knit family and a down-to-earth personality, a Madonna without the controversy. Hundreds of teenagers, many weeping, gathered at the scene of the shooting, while on the other side of town a long procession of cars passed the lower-middle-class home where Selena lived. Many fans placed balloons and notes of condolence in a chain-link fence in front of her property. Bouquets of flowers piled up outside her boutique.
In San Antonio, the acknowledged capital of Tejano music, Selena’s fans responded to news of her death by organizing two memorial services on Friday night. On San Antonio’s South Side, a throng that included children and seniors converged on the parking lot of South Park Mall. As darkness fell, they waved candles, wept and swayed gently to Selena’s recordings. A similar scene took place across town at Brackenridge Park. Meanwhile, thousands of callers jammed the lines at the state’s 32 Tejano radio stations, most of which were alternating coverage of the shooting with Selena music “marathons.”
Selena was born in the blue-collar factory town of Lake Jackson, just south of Houston. After her father was laid off by Dow Chemical, the family moved to Corpus Christi and plunged into the music business. “We went to Corpus Christi to put food on the table when I was 6-1/2,” Selena said in the Time interview. “We would play for family weddings. When I was eight I recorded my first song in Spanish, a country song. When I was nine we started a Tex-Mex band.” She stuck with it, spending much of her time as a teenager on the road and getting her high-school diploma through a correspondence course. In 1989 she and her band, Los Dinos, got their big break-a recording contract with giant EMI–and then began to ride the wave of Tejano music, now the fastest- growing segment of the Hispanic recording business. Her father still manages the band, which includes her brother and husband.
While Tejano fans reside mostly in Texas and Mexico, they range as far north as Michigan and New York City. Selena’s rise paralleled the success of other Tejano bands such as La Diferenzia, Mazz and La Mafia. But Selena was far and away the biggest star of the Tejano universe. By the age of 19 she was a millionaire. At 21 she could draw a crowd of 20,000 to the fairgrounds in Pasadena, Texas. Last year 60,000 people showed up to hear her in Houston, and her Selena Live won a Grammy as the best Mexican-American album. The single Amor Prohibido (Forbidden Love), from her most recent album, has sold 400,000 copies in the U.S. and abroad. Most of her songs are a form of dance pop that combines Top 40 melodies with the rhythms of Colombian cumbia and traditional Texas conjunto-the border music influenced by Czech and German polkas, featuring accordions and bajo sexto guitars. Selena’s lyrics, which were often written in English and then translated into Spanish, are straightforward and simple. At the time of her death, Selena was working on her first English- language record, one that many felt would help her cross over as Gloria Estefan did. “She was one of us,” said Rosemary Escamilla of Corpus Christi. “I’d see her at Wal-Mart or K Mart without makeup, like she didn’t have all that money.” Said another fan: “We lost a very good friend. She was our idol. We just can’t believe she died that way.”
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