Selena 
The Manual 2.0 
Dreaming of Her
She was a girl from the barrio whose voice won her a Grammy, sold millions of albums, and turned her into a sensation unlike any other. And when she was murdered, on March 31, 1995, Tejano superstar Selena Quintanilla Perez seemed to take with her the aspirations of fans across the globe. Yet fifteen years later, her memory is more alive and venerated than ever. In this exclusive oral history, her family, bandmates, and friends recall the life of a star who still mesmerizes us all.
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MARTIN GOMEZ I will never forget hearing the announcement on the radio: “This is not an April Fools’ joke. Selena Quintanilla Perez has died.” I lost it. I remember not going to work the next day and getting really drunk. My wife found me on the kitchen floor, sobbing.
JOE NICK PATOSKI I went to the Days Inn two days after the shooting, and there were a lot of people milling around with dazed expressions on their faces. One guy had hitchhiked from Michigan; he put his thumb out as soon as he had heard the news and arrived at the Days Inn that morning. The doorway to the room where Selena was shot had been turned into a shrine, and people were retracing her steps from the room to the motel office. I remember it was very quiet and nobody was talking. There were people on their hands and knees in the Saint Augustine grass, looking for blood, mementos, anything, trying to make sense of it all.
“We couldn’t believe a brown girl could be so famous.”
After the shooting, Saldivar sat in her pickup outside the Days Inn and held the gun to her head, keeping police at bay for nine and a half hours. Before surrendering, at 9:35 p.m., she blamed her actions on Abraham, telling negotiators, “Her father hates me. Her father is responsible for this.” (Saldivar declined to be interviewed for this story.) Her trial, which was held in Houston that October, ended in a guilty verdict. Saldivar is now serving a life sentence for murder with a deadly weapon at the Mountain View Unit, in Gatesville, where she is kept in protective custody due to the notoriety of her case. By order of the trial judge, the .38 that she used to kill Selena was cut into fifty pieces and scattered across Corpus Christi Bay.
ABRAHAM QUINTANILLA We had to move after her death. We could hardly leave the house for the first few weeks because of the crowds outside. Months afterward, there were still people standing outside the house, even in the middle of the night. I’m not talking about one or two people. I’m talking about fifteen or twenty, there in the street, all the time, even at three o’clock in the morning.
RAMIRO BURR It was like a daily series of shocks. I’d been on the beat by that time for almost fifteen years, and yet I underestimated what she meant to people and how fully they felt connected to her. Her albums went platinum after her death, and Dreaming of You came out a few months later and instantly went to number one. And then she stayed in the news continuously because of the investigation and the trial. The fascination with her just did not stop. I remember reading an AP story months after she died about how there was a big spike in the number of baby girls being named Selena.
NANCY BRENNAN She was the first Latin artist to debut on the Billboard charts at number one. Of course, the buildup—the media attention to this horrible situation—meant that everybody was anticipating this release. There were supposed to be fourteen tracks, but we had only recorded four of them, so we put together a tribute album of new and old songs. Making that album was the most difficult thing I have ever had to do, because we were listening to her voice all day and crying as we were mixing the songs.
SUZETTE QUINTANILLA ARRIAGA Everybody deals with grief differently. I used to get out all my photos and open up my sister’s traveling makeup case so I could smell her. I took over the boutiques because I knew Selena would have wanted to keep them going, but it was traumatic. All day, every day, people came into the store to tell me how much they loved my sister, and sometimes I had to go into the back and just cry and cry. To this day, my mother doesn’t talk publicly about what happened. Chris kind of shut down. He left everything in the house exactly as it was the day she died. Dad consumed himself with work. My mother told me once, “Your father cries in the shower because he doesn’t want me to know he’s crying. He thinks I can’t hear him, but I can.”
CHRIS PEREZ My marriage was over, my band was over. We had talked about having kids while we were still young, but that was over. Everything ended, just like that.
A. B. QUINTANILLA Nothing will ever be the same as sharing the stage with my sister. When we performed in Central America, there were times when the emotion was so overwhelming that I would start to cry. I would turn away from the crowd and act like something was wrong with the amplifier until I gathered myself. You have to understand: She was generating electricity, and I was a part of that conductor. After she passed away, I played my own music at the Astrodome. I played in Estadio Azteca, in Mexico City, for 125,000 people. But I was never able to re-create that high again. No matter how far I’ve gone with my own music, it’s never had the same flavor. It’s like food without salt.
CAMERON RANDLE Tejano became increasingly directionless after she died. Selena had a great deal to do with driving the market, and once she was gone, there was a lot of confusion and disorientation. There was uncertainty about who would carry the mantle going forward, and Tejano never really recovered.
DEBORAH PAREDEZ People magazine did a split cover when she died, with Selena on newsstands in the Southwest and the cast of Friends on newsstands in the rest of the country. The Selena issue sold out, as did multiple reprintings of the issue. As a result, People produced a tribute issue. It was only the third time in the magazine’s history that a tribute issue had been produced; previous ones were for Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Audrey Hepburn. The tribute issue and subsequent printings sold out, and that’s how People en Español came about. There was a realization in the publishing industry that there was a whole Latino market out there that mainstream culture had been overlooking.
RENA DEARMAN Anglo friends of mine would tell me, “I didn’t know anything about Selena until she died, and now I listen to her music and I love it.” They would sing her songs, and they had no idea what they were singing, but they loved her music. I was glad that everyone finally knew what I had known all along, but it was also bittersweet.
DEBORAH PAREDEZ After her death, I think some Latinos were surprised to discover that she had touched so many lives beyond their community. Part of that may be due to our own internalized racism; we couldn’t believe a brown girl could be so famous. Dark-skinned Latinos are certainly not embraced by popular culture very often. And among Tejanos, we thought of Selena as one of our own. She was just like us; she was our girl. When you’re Tejano, you’re keenly aware of the hierarchy of Latinos, and Tejanos are the least cool in that hierarchy. We’re the blue-collar country bumpkins. So to see her embraced by a range of Latinos was profound.
MARTIN GOMEZ Selena was the first person who made me proud to be Mexican. Before Selena, I was more embarrassed than proud, to be honest. The sense of pride she had about where she came from was new to me, because I had pretty much grown up in an all-white world. The music and the world that Selena created all made me extremely proud of where I came from, and I started thinking of myself as Mexican American.
KEREN SMITH is Selena’s first cousin and lives in Selena’s old house. Fans drive by on a daily basis. They drive by real slowly, staring. Some do a U-turn at the end of the street and drive past the house several times, and then they stop to take pictures. Many of them have traveled from far away, so they want to get a good look before they leave.
ANTONIO ZAVALETA is a scholar of folk religion. He is a professor of anthropology and the special assistant to the provost at the University of Texas at Brownsville. There is a long tradition in Latino culture of designating folk heroes, like Pancho Villa or El Niño Fidencio, as folk saints, or santos populares. In death, Selena is emerging as one of these revered folk saints. The living and the suffering believe they can ask the spirit of Selena—which is most certainly in heaven, having been martyred—to intercede with the Mother of God on their behalf for the delivery of a miracle, such as bringing a wayward daughter home.
CELIA MACIAS There isn’t a day that goes by that there aren’t people out there visiting her memorial. I work right around the corner, so sometimes I go and have lunch with her. If I get five minutes alone with her, that’s unusual. Someone will bring flowers or take her picture or pay their respects. Once, I met three teenage girls from the Netherlands there who had spent five years saving up money so they could visit Selena’s hometown. Some days I sit there and think, “Oh, girl, I wish you were here to see all this.”
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