Selena and Me

Support for WBUR comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at MathWorks.com. WBUR podcasts. Boston. What is WBUR? If I was somehow asked to say only one thing about the place I'm from, it would be that it has this unforgettable smell when it rains. It's slightly floral, but mostly it's this very specific, cool, earthy desert aroma. And there's usually a calm, clear breeze which carries these concentrated little pockets of fragrance. Oh my god, there it is. The smell comes from the Creosote Bush, a resilient plant that thrives only in this particularly arid landscape. Especially after a thunderstorm, the Creosote Bush releases a bunch of these oil compounds into the air. Stuff found in citrus, rosemary, pines, and it just smells like the earth exhales. Creosote can live for thousands or tens of thousands of years. It's one of the oldest living things on the planet. And here, this ancient brush grows at the foot of the Franklin Mountains and the valley they nestle below. Cutting through the desert valley is the Rio Grande, dividing two cities and two countries. El Paso, Texas to the north and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico to the south. This story, my story, long before I became a journalist and moved to the east coast, begins here. Well, I remember seeing El Paso from the hill where my monana lived. This is my brother. He was five when I was born in Ciudad Juarez, just a few miles from the border. One of his very first memories is looking into the U.S. from Mexico. We could see UTEP, we could see the buildings, the highway, we could see the other side. In Mexico, we lived in a vecindad, these tenement studio apartments all connected through the same courtyard. Something like ten families shared one bathroom, outside. Both of my parents had to quit school by the age of 13 to help their families. The other side of the border looked like it could afford my brother and I the life our parents couldn't have. When I was three, my dad landed a minimum wage factory job in the States. So we moved across the border to a refurbished trailer in the most rural outskirts of El Paso County. The land was dry and flat, untouched. And I remember getting off the car and seeing those huge tumbleweeds. And under there, usually there's snake pits, you know, there's snakes. And when we first moved out here, there was always, you know, there was always snakes coming out. One of my earliest memories ever is the smell of Creosote Bush here. We were ecstatic as a family, you know, we loved the trailer. We still went to Juarez every weekend. There was always a cousin's birthday party or a baby shower or an anniversary in Mexico. We made home videos at these big family parties. A bunch of kids speaking Spanglish and staying up way late. I remember what is always being loud, like fun loud. We danced into the early morning hours at either of my grandmother's houses. A brood of cousins eating street tacos glistening in the dark amber of the Mexican street lamps. This was my early life, Mexico on the weekend, the states during the week. And soon I started school. On the first day of first grade, my teacher called me Mary. My actual name is Maria Elena, a name passed down from my grandmother. My mom says no one ever asked her if changing my name from Maria Elena to Mary was okay. She just kind of found out in an open house. When my teacher started talking about Mary, and she was like, who's that? It didn't really even occur to my mom to object. She didn't speak English. We were undocumented. So she was like, okay, I guess they'll call her Mary. My name soon became a source of ridicule. Whenever a substitute teacher said my real name, Maria, kids would say, ew, a Mexican name. I remember what it felt like as shame took form inside of me. In the third grade, a classmate found some paperwork in the school office that said I was born in Juarez. He confronted me like I was hoarding a shameful secret and he'd found me out. I panicked. I said there must have been a mistake. This kid who confronted me, he was white, the son of a wealthy farmer who employed seasonal Mexican workers. Kids like him were at the top of the elementary school hierarchy. Opposite were the kids of the Mexican farm workers. My school was predominantly Latino, but the pecking order rewarded only the most assimilated of kids. These moments of shame, of lying, they feel like some of the oldest wounds in me. But I thought I needed to be Mary. Mary spoke English perfectly. She was American. And I did kind of become Mary. Soon I was more articulate in English. Kids in Mexico called me a bocha, a Mexican American who debases the culture with our class working class, Banglish. And I felt a rejection, a stigma in both countries. I toggled between Mary and Maria, switching at either side of the border. In both places, it felt like the other half of me was missing. Like these two parts of myself were divorced from each other, a gash inside of me separating them. The border defined me and divided me. And then something changed my life. I saw a completely new way of being. I discovered Selena. I know I had heard her music before and been vaguely aware of her, but I specifically remember the first time I really saw Selena on TV. I must have been about seven. She had this cascade of black hair, red lips, brown skin. She sang like she felt every single word of her songs, like the music was emanating from her body. People just loved her. I loved her. She usually wore these skin tight pants or a mini skirt with an embellished bra or bustier, sometimes peeking out from a leather jacket or see-through blouse. There were a lot of rhinestones and hoop earrings. And she was this gifted exuberant dancer, mastering popular American moves like the Roger Rabbit or the Moonwalk. And then in a blink of a night, she switched to some elaborate Goomba twirls. No one danced like her. Her charisma spilled off the screen. Her voice emoted every feeling with precision. She'd go from these synth-y Tex Mexcumbias to traditional Mexican rancheras. And then bam, she'd sing a song in English that sounded like something I would hear on my top 40 station with R&B influences. She was this force on stage. And off stage, she was joyful and humble, like a real person. I remember someone asking her once what she'd do if she wasn't a famous singer. And she was like, I don't know, work at a fast food joint. To seven-year-old me in 1993, it felt nothing short of revolutionary to see a Mexican-American woman with working-class roots, take pride in who she was, and have the world love her for it. When I discovered her, Selena was in her early 20s and already a total star. She'd been singing since she was nine, touring Texas cities. I remember seeing her on TV, winning at the Tejano Music Awards. This is so cool. I'd like to thank every one of you who have supported Selena's Venus for many, many years. It's been such a long time since we've been in the music business. I would see her in commercials on Texas TV stations. I remember people constantly talking about how she would be a mainstream crossover star once she finished recording an English album she was working on. But to me, she was already a total American pop star. What completely blew my mind was that she had crossed over into Mexico, the Mexico where kids made fun of me for not speaking Spanish perfectly, for not being the type of Mexican that people thought I should be. My home country that sometimes felt like it rejected me. But here was Selena, queen of all pochas, and Mexico loved her. When I would mess up my Spanish, I felt this pang of humiliation and panic. But Selena was messing up Spanish all the time, and she did it with an open heart. When she sang, Selena could pass for a native Spanish speaker. But she didn't really learn to speak Spanish until she was a teenager. Here was Selena saying stuff wrong, translating out loud, struggling for words in Spanish, and sometimes English, just like me. Selena switched between Spanish and English, Mexican and American in the public eye. And there were no cruel jokes, no shame in her accent, just adoration. She declared herself a proud Mexican. To me, it was as if she told Mexico, "I don't sound like you." But this heritage is mine to claim too. It's never too late to get close to your roots, she'd say. Her identity as a Mexican-American wasn't some novel detail people would find out about her. No, it was central to her presentation as an artist and as a person. She was explicitly Mexican-American. And just the way she looked really made an impression on me. Growing up on Univision and Mexican programming, all I mostly saw on television were these Mexicans with fair skin and often with blonde hair and light colored eyes. I remember watching Selena on Mexican shows and thinking, "She looks more Mexican than the host." Shout out to you if you recognize this telenovela open from your childhood. Selena made cameos as herself on this hugely popular Mexican show, her halting Spanish contrasting the heavily enunciated sound of mostly white Mexicans around her. She was just magnetic, different, and by 1994, when I was nine, Selena was ascending to Latino royalty. The Grammy goes to live Selena. She won a Grammy award for best Mexican-American album for a live record of her music. That night, she wore this sparkly white gown with her black hair in a tall updo, curly wisps framing her glowing face. I'd also like to thank my bambozinos, my father Abraham, my brother, who's a producer of my music, and also my sister. Thank you for all the support. And I'd also like to thank all of you in my Latin family. Thank you for having faith in me. I love you. Thank you. She was an international star, filling major stages in Latin America. After a performance in New York City, the New York Times called her the undisputed queen of the fastest growing Latino genre in the country. It felt surreal to see someone like me making it on her own terms. One of ours, those of us in the middle, who felt like we weren't enough, enough to be fully Mexican or fully American. But Selena was enough in both places. And that meant that maybe I could be enough. Hey, it's Roman Mars from 99% Invisible, the podcast about the unnoticed architecture and design that shapes our world. And it's Ben Brock Johnson from WBUR's show about online communities endless thread. And we're bringing you a brand new limited series that we made together. It's about how the video game world has changed the world beyond video games. From the history of the joystick to one of the strangest games that Sega ever made. We're calling our series Hidden Levels, and you can get it in the endless thread feed. Or the 99% invisible feed hits start wherever you get your podcasts. I don't remember if I went to school on March 31, 1995. The day feels like a patchwork of images etched in my memory. It's hard to remember the order of things. I just see these vignettes, these split second moments, and I remember this pit in my stomach. I was at home in the trailer, seeing my mom glued to the TV, tears rolling down her rosy cheeks. I'd never seen her cry for someone who wasn't our family. Family members in Mexico and the states called us, crying in shock, asking if we were watching the news on TV. Corpus Christi police converged on this motel around 11.30 this morning and quickly surrounded a red pickup truck. Inside, the woman suspected of shooting to death, Tejano music star Selena Quintanilla Perez. Details poured in. Selena had been shot by the president of her fan club. Her name was Yolanda Saldívar. I remember seeing her face on the news and feeling my body fill up with a novel kind of rage. The suspect in the shooting has been holding police at bay for hours, sitting in a pickup truck in the parking lot and holding a gun to her head. When my dad came home from work that Friday, we watched the TV together. It got dark. I wept. My mom held me. The standoff ended after 10 hours of very intense negotiations. The suspect Yolanda Saldívar came out of the truck. The police officers. I just broke out in tears and I couldn't believe it. And I still can't believe it. I'm still in shock. Suddenly, Latinos, especially working class Mexican-American people, were everywhere on TV, crying for her on the street, talking about what she meant to them. Fans who did not know her felt as if they did. And their pain reflected the loss of a good friend. And, you know, it just hurts to be a good person. I remember how rare it felt to see so many people like me on TV. We played her music loud. We mourned her out loud. Maybe we were finally ourselves out loud. Selena wanted to become a household name. And earlier this year, in a most tragic incident, she got her wish. I couldn't articulate this at that time. I hadn't intellectualized it. But I felt it. This shift inside of me. An urgency to stop succumbing to shame, to stop dividing myself in two. Selena didn't hide who she was. How could I? Since Selena has stayed with me, she's been this constant, almost mythic-like source of inspiration and resilience in my own life. I played her music after many hard days as a reporter along the border in my 20s. I wore a t-shirt with her face on it when I needed some confidence at the fancy East Coast graduate school I went to. I watch her old concerts if I feel out of place in Boston, where I'm based out of now. My love for Selena has informed even my current line of work as an arts and culture editor and critic, because I first experienced the power of art and music and symbolism through her. Selena is this way home, this path to my roots. This cornerstone that I come back to when I need to feel grounded, when I need to remember who I am. A quarter century later, Selena's everywhere. Her iconography is ubiquitous. She's on candles and t-shirts and murals. Kim Kardashian dressed up as Selena for Halloween. Beyonce credits Selena as an early example of stardom that inspired her. The Netflix series about her life hit number one in multiple countries. Selena's clothing is at the Smithsonian. Billboard ranks her as a top female Latin artist of all time. She's also become a loaded symbol, sometimes used for political or social causes. She means so many things to so many people. Selena Aguilas Dielas was the soundtrack of our lives. Selena was the first one of representation for me as a Chicana. There was a lot of pride that people took in Selena and in her music. Whether you're from Puerto Rico or you're from the F area, you're from the United States. Her music permeates everywhere. She was an icon that represented hope, like, you know, we can all do it because Selena did. And we can pull something from her experience, from her life story, from her music. This podcast, it's not really about Selena's story. I mean, yes, it is. But really, I'm trying to understand why her impact feels as far reaching today as it did a quarter of a century ago. I want to know what mourning, remembering, celebrating Selena means. And after many, many months of immersing myself in her, I've come to realize Selena is like this vessel to understand so many things about race, class, body politics, and finding our place in this country. I wrote this podcast in El Paso because this border made me exist in an in-between, an in-between that drew me to Selena in the first place. I spent months in quarantine thinking about Selena and me here, sometimes after the scarce desert rain. I don't know where this journey will take me, where I'll land, but I know where I start. And I start here. I start at the border. I start at the place that made me. I start from looking at the world as a fronteriza. I'm Maria Garcia, and this is Anything for Selena, a podcast about belonging from WBUR and Futuro Studios. I have to be honest with you, I was scared at the beginning of this journey. When I got the green light for this project, it was under one condition, that I secure something from Selena's family, not just an interview, but something else that at that time seemed kind of impossible to get. And I knew that to really understand Selena, not as this big icon, but as a real person, I had to go to her father. As a Selena fan all my life, I had complicated feelings about her dad. I'd seen him in the Selena movie, portrayed as a controlling, shouting, possessive father. So if I wanted to make this podcast, I had to go to Abraham Quintanilla, notoriously known for guarding Selena's legacy with an iron fist, and ask him for something big. That's next time on Anything for Selena. Anything for Selena is a co-production of the iLab at WBUR, Boston's NPR news station and Futuro Studios. I'm your host, Maria Garcia. Our producers are Kristin Torres, Antonia Cerejido, and Juan Diego Ramirez, with additional production assistants from Frank Hernandez, Sandra Rigno, and Maria Alexa Cavanaugh. Mixing and sound design by Paul Vakis. Our editor is Marlon Bishop. Ben Brock Johnson is the executive producer of the iLab and contributed production management. Additional editing for this episode by Catherine Brewer and the ever-discerning Iris Adler, who greenlit this podcast and changed my life. Thank you. Iliana Galvez created the artwork for this series. Find out more about Anything for Selena on Twitter and Instagram at Selena_Podcast and at WBUR.org/AnythingForSelena.