The Queen Is Dead

Selena Quintanilla Perez, Tejano’s first superstar, was about to become an international pop sensation. Instead, she’s another victim of gun violence in Texas.

by Joe Nick Patoski

May 1995

(Page 3 of 3)

The fans started showing up as early as four in the morning, though the doors didn’t open until nine. Still, things went smoothly until a rumor spread through the crowd late in the afternoon: The coffin was empty; Selena’s death was a publicity stunt. To calm the well-wishers, the family had the casket opened. The body was Selena’s. Her hands, folded across her chest, clutched a single red rose. By ten, when the doors finally closed, almost 60,000 people had paid their respects.

I drove home that night but the next morning impulsively decided to drive back to Corpus. It was too late to attend the private funeral service, but since it was being broadcast live by San Antonio TV and radio stations, I listened while driving down the highway—with my headlights on. Minister Sam Wax, a Jehovah’s Witness, preached in English about the resurrection of Jesus according to the faith. “Jesus said, ‘Do not marvel at this.’” The service lasted less than twenty minutes. At the family’s request, each of the six hundred mourners placed a white rose on the coffin. Before long, a two-foot pile of roses rested atop the casket, which was eventually cleared and lowered into the ground.

I pulled into the parking lot of the Days Inn precisely 24 hours after my first visit. Just as many people were walking the grounds and searching for traces of the crime, but the façade of room 158 had been transformed. Messages scribbled in ink, pencil, and felt-tip marker covered the door, the window, the sidewalk, even the limestone block interior. From a distance, room 158 looked like an altar.

When I first heard Selena had been shot, I thought I was witnessing the end of an era and the shattering of the great American crossover dream. Now I wasn’t so sure. At the very least, my Anglo friends finally knew how to properly pronounce “Tejano.” And I was getting a life’s education in the art of grieving, the power of family, and the cycle of life and death. How sad it all was—and yet how vibrant and full of life this send-off was. These people, most of them strangers to Selena, had gathered to say their good-byes. I heaved a deep sigh, wiped the tears from my eyes, and took one last look around.

The Wisdom of Abraham

It was midafternoon when I arrived at Q Productions, an old auto body shop along Corpus Christi’s Leopard Street industrial strip that the Quintanillas had transformed into a company office and recording facility. Most of the mourners had already cleared out, and Eddie Quintanilla, Selena’s uncle, was happy to regale me with tales of his childhood and of his brother Abraham’s high school group, Los Dinos. Abraham loved street corner doo-wop music and rhythm and blues, Eddie said, but he played traditional Tex-Mex fare—polkas and waltzes with Spanish lyrics—to pay the bills. He recalled how Abraham took a good job, working for Dow Chemical in Lake Jackson, to support his family. With money he saved, he opened a nice Mexican restaurant, quit the plant, and re-formed Los Dinos with his older children. Selena began singing in the restaurant when she was eight. Then oil prices slumped, people quit eating out, and the restaurant went under.

In 1982, Eddie said, Abraham moved the family back to Corpus Christi. Music provided them with sustenance as they traveled across Texas and the United States in a battered van pulling a broken-down trailer. “That was a long, long time ago,” Eddie added with a smile.

I found Abraham Quintanilla sitting in a chair in the studio control room while a TV crew packed up its gear. A broad bull of a man, Abraham had impressed me as a classic band manager, a streetwise type who instantly sends the message that he’s not to be trifled with. He certainly knows the rules of survival on the tejano dance hall circuit: how money at this level of show business is generated (in gate receipts and merchandising, not CDs and cassettes), who was most likely to steal it from you, which disc jockeys can sell an extra 10,000 copies of an album, which promoters skim off the door.

Above all, he knows talent. Even when the shy Selena was singing country music in English or, later, when the members of Los Dinos were jumping around in shiny space suits, Abraham saw something. And, indeed, in 1989 he managed to sign a breakthrough six-figure deal for the band to cut Spanish-language records for EMI’s new Latin division. Then came last year’s English-language contract with SBK records. The beat-up van and rickety trailer were replaced by a tour bus, and a semi full of production and staging equipment. Selena y los Dinos had become a mini-empire. I couldn’t help but wonder then if Selena would someday ditch her father and sign with a big-time management firm in New York or Los Angeles. Now, that was beside the point.

Since Selena’s death, Abraham had been on automatic pilot—talking to reporters, overseeing funeral plans, conceding that he had always been wary of Yolanda Saldivar, even lamenting the death threats that Emilio Navaira’s wife had received. But as the crowd began to leave, he spoke with dread abut the future. “When I see that empty place and I know she’s not there, I’m going to start missing her,” he said. “It’s a tragic thing that happened. It’s a reality.”

We talked of respect, of family, and of the senselessness of the crime. Abraham railed against the concealed-weapons bill that the Texas Legislature would likely pass: “We live in a dangerous world. Why make it worse? My God, everyone’s armed to the teeth. Anybody is liable to kill you for a minute thing.”

But life would go on, he vowed. He manages six other bands, and his other children are certainly gifted enough to perform on their own. Selena had already recorded four tracks for her English-language debut, and four more songs in English are on the sound track of the new movie, Don Juan DeMarco, in which she has a cameo appearance. There was enough material for a new album. “Of course, it would never be the same,” he said. “There will never be another Selena. But we’ll go forward with it.”

I told him what I had seen, how people were looking for answers. Were there any lessons they could take from the tragedy?

He paused deliberately. “Parents, it’s time to go back to the old-fashioned way of teaching our children,” he said. “About morals, about the dangers of life. They’re too trusting. They don’t think there are bad things out there. I hope that a lot of young people see this and grow cautious. I don’t think Selena knew how popular she was getting. I would tell her, ‘Mi hijita, don’t go to the store by yourself at night. Don’t go to the mall alone. There are people who will kill you for no reason, just because you are famous.’”

Abraham Quintanilla knew all that, but he also knew his daughter was old enough to make her own decisions. She would listen, then tell him, “Dad, you think all people are bad. I can take care of myself.”

Abraham talked about the band’s first Mexican tour. The promoter warned them that the media there thrived on sensationalism. Yet Selena disarmed everyone at Los Dinos’ first Mexican press conference by walking in and hugging every single journalist. “By the time she started doing interviews, they were in the palm of her hand,” Abraham said, smiling. “The next day, all the articles praised her. They said she wasn’t some prefabricated blonde. Several remarked about the color of her skin.” It was the brown tone of the masses not the pale white of the Castillian Spanish. “They called her una mujer del pueblo—a woman of the people. She never forgot where she came from.”

You may soon have a problem, I told him. The veneration of Selena was taking on a life of its own.

He shook his head. “Selena wouldn’t want that. She believed worship should go only to the Creator. Just remember her as a good person who loved people and loved life. I don’t think Selena would be pleased to be part of any form of idolatry.”

I told him how sorry I was for him and his family and hugged him in an abrazo.

Moments later, I was back on the highway, holding back sniffles, ready for the long weekend to end. I turned on KEDT-FM to listen to the news when an announcer broke in, saying there had just been a shooting at a refinery inspection company in Corpus Christi. Five people were shot by a former employee with a pistol. The company was only about five miles from Q Productions. It happened at the same moment Abraham Quintanilla and I were talking about guns and violence.

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