She left a cultural, musical legacy
By MICHAEL D. CLARK
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle





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• ¡Selena Vive! (Selena Lives!), a tribute concert at Reliant
Stadium on April 7, will commemorate the 10th anniversary of the
Tejano-music legend's death.

Pop stars Thalía and Gloria Estefan, rockers Alejandra Guzmán and
Carlos Vives, and ranchera star Pepe Aguilar will perform. Banda el
Recodo, Fey, Ana Gabriel, India, Lucero, Montez de Durango, Jay
Pérez, Bobby Pulido, A.B. Quintanilla III & the Kumbia Kings, Aleks
Syntek and the original members of Selena's band, Los Dinos, will
also perform songs from Selena's catalog. The show will air live on
Univision, Channel 45. Concert proceeds will go to a joint Univision
Network/Selena Foundation scholarship fund.

Tickets, $15-$90, are available through Ticketmaster. The show will
be taped for a CD and DVD due May 10.


Alvin native Teresa Barrientos remembers with great clarity where
she was 10 years ago today when she heard that Tejano superstar
Selena had been shot and killed.


"It was around 11 a.m., and I was getting ready to go to work. I
remember turning on the radio and hearing the news," she said. "I
got out of the car, looked at my husband and said, 'Honey, they shot
Selena.'

"I started crying. I felt like part of her family, and she was gone.
I was hoping that they were wrong. Maybe they had made a mistake."

A decade after she was shot and killed by Yolanda Saldivar — the
head of her fan club and manager of her boutique — at a Days Inn in
Corpus Christi, Selena maintains an almost mythical legacy. Sales of
her albums have cooled since she topped the pop charts with the
posthumously released Dreaming of You, but Selena's importance as a
Latin icon — not only as a Tejano star who crossed into the American
pop mainstream but also as a symbol of success through hard work —
is still growing.

Betty Cortina, editorial director of Latina magazine, was a reporter
with People when she went to Corpus Christi 10 days after Selena's
death to spend time with the singer's family. Researching Selena
over the past decade, Cortina has learned that the singer's cultural
legacy is much more important than her musical one to Hispanics,
particularly Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.

"(Selena) represents a young, Hispanic girl — equal parts Mexican
and American — who was successful and unabashedly living her dream,
but never abandoning her identity," said Cortina. "There was a great
amount of pride when she was on stage because she was representing
who we are.

"She was the quintessential American success story, and to have that
cut off is tragic."

Like San Antonio and Corpus Christi — where Selena's family lives
and runs Q Production studios, which fosters young Latin musical
talent — Houston, in particular, felt the heartache of her death.

Houston native Catherine McDonald was a Lamar High School student at
the time, attending a soccer game when the news broke. "Se murió
("she died") was working its way to us from the top of the
bleachers," she recalled, "almost a chant. Players on the field were
alerted and told by their girlfriends. Girls and women cried
throughout the entire game.

"I don't remember who won the game or by how much, but I will never
forget the collective reaction of my schoolmates."


A monumental show
A month earlier, on Feb. 26, 1995, Selena had given a concert at
RodeoHouston in the Astrodome that found her riding high behind her
landmark album Amor Prohibido. The show teased at her impending
crossover into the English language market with the soon-to-be
released Dreaming of You.

What should have been the beginning of Selena's superstardom was her
final performance, a monumental show that was captured on CD and DVD
as Live: The Last Concert; the show was also re-enacted in the 1997
biopic starring Jennifer Lopez.

"It was a standing-room-only crowd, and we had journalists from all
over Central and South America," said Houston Livestock Show and
Rodeo assistant general manager Leroy Shafer. "We were very excited
that Abraham (Quintanilla, Selena's father) was planning to make a
live album from the show. None of us dreamed that the album would
eventually come out for a much different reason."

Selena's death gave Tejano music a national audience.

"What a price to pay for the spotlight," said Tejano pioneer Little
Joe Hernandez. "She really didn't get to flourish and fulfill what I
think would have been even more incredible heights."

The vigils, tears and remembrances after Selena's death had a huge
cultural impact; the voice of an ignored demographic was finally
heard. That the death of a musical icon unfamiliar to most of the
country could draw an outpouring of grief similar to that for John
Lennon suggested Hispanic culture was growing.

Five years later, the 2000 census confirmed what the reaction to
Selena's death had hinted at: There was a 12.9 million increase of
Hispanics in the U.S. during the '90s including a bump of 53 percent
in the number of people of Mexican descent.

The census also revealed that half of the nation's Hispanic
population lived in California or Texas.

Unlike some of popular music's other icons who died young, there is
a purity to Selena's legacy. Her demise wasn't self-destructive like
Kurt Cobain's or Jim Morrison's. There weren't accusations of
arrogance or lost weekends of debauchery, as there were with John
Lennon. Her career was so short that it never experienced valleys to
counter the peak she was climbing to at the time of her death.


A role model
"Selena took the Mexican-American experience and elevated it very
proudly, and she never compromised her heritage," said Cortina, who
is a Cuban-American. "Her life told me as a girl that you can still
be successful and be who you are.

"Her legend is definitely still alive. I was a year older than
Selena, and her life and death made me look at my own life. I never
met her, but in many ways I am sitting where am sitting because of
her."

Barrientos, 34, met Selena on a couple of occasions 15 years ago
when she watched her shows up close at La Villa Real dancehall in
McAllen. She remembers that Selena never refused an autograph
request and that she would stay for every picture, only requesting
that kids get to snap their shots first.

Like Cortina, Barrientos still thinks about the singer often. There
is rarely a day that Selena's cumbias and ballads aren't played on
the CD player in her truck as she travels to work at the YMCA.

The tragedy of Selena's slaying coincides with a much happier event
in Barrientos' life, her marriage to husband Julio just 13 days
earlier. Last week the couple celebrated their anniversary, taking
their 8-year-old son to Corpus Christi to visit the Selena museum
and gravesite and to shop at the boutique that bears her name.

"When I was at the grave I got emotional again. How could a young
woman with all that talent be gone?" asked Barrientos. "I think
she's still with me. She's still with a lot of us."