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Hola, y bienvenidos
Hello, and welcome
My name is Melinda Anguiano. I'm 22, I'm in nursing school in El Paso, Texas, and I grew up on
Selena's music. My mom played her tapes in the kitchen on Saturday mornings while we cleaned the
house, and my sister and I used the broom handles for microphones.
I was eighteen when we lost her. I made this page in March 1997, the week the movie came out,
because I had to put all that feeling somewhere, and it's been growing a little at a time ever
since. Four years later I still play Amor Prohibido in the car. Sometimes I sing. Sometimes
I just listen.
A promise: there are no song lyrics on this page. Her songs are hers. Go buy the albums and hear
her sing them, because nobody else can.
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Su historia
Her story
Selena Quintanilla was born on April 16, 1971, in Lake Jackson, Texas, down on the Gulf Coast,
the youngest of three kids. Her father, Abraham, had sung in a band himself when he was young, and
when he heard his little girl sing he put together a family band: her brother A.B. on bass, her
sister Suzette on drums, and Selena out front. They called it Selena y Los Dinos.
Here is the part I love most. Selena grew up speaking English. Her father taught her to sing in
Spanish when she was a little girl, and she learned the language as she went, the way a lot of us
did. The family moved to Corpus Christi, and the band played weddings and dances and fairs all over
South Texas, anywhere that would have them. A.B. grew up to write and produce a lot of her biggest
songs.
She sang Tejano music, the music of Texas Mexicans: cumbias and rancheras and polkas with
an accordion and a keyboard and a beat you can't sit still for. Tejano was mostly a man's world
back then. She changed that.
Her album Live! won the Grammy for Best Mexican-American Album in 1994, and that same year
came Amor Prohibido, and suddenly she was everywhere, on the radio from Texas to Mexico, and
we all knew she was about to be famous everywhere else too. She was making an album in English.
She designed her own clothes. She married her guitar player, Chris Pérez, in 1992. She was
just getting started.
On Friday, March 31, 1995, Selena was killed in Corpus Christi. She was twenty-three years old.
That summer the English album she'd been working on, Dreaming of You, came out. In 1997
there was a movie about her life, and a statue of her went up on the bayfront in Corpus Christi,
at a place called the Mirador de la Flor. Mirador means a lookout, a place to stand
and see. La flor is the flower, for her song "Como la Flor."
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Los discos que tengo
The albums I own
 Ven Conmigo (1990). My tía (my aunt) gave me the tape for my fourteenth birthday. "Baila Esta Cumbia" still gets me off the couch.
Entre a Mi Mundo (1992). "Como la Flor" and "La Carcacha." The one that made everybody at my school learn her name, and the song my page is named for.
Live! (1993). The Grammy winner. Turn it up loud and you can almost feel the dance floor shaking.
Amor Prohibido (1994). Her best, I think. "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom," "No Me Queda Más," "Fotos y Recuerdos," and the title song, about a love nobody wants to allow because one of them is poor.
Dreaming of You (1995). Her new English songs, like "I Could Fall in Love," with some Spanish ones too. It went to number one, and she wasn't here to see it. I can't listen to the title song without crying, so I mostly don't.
Siempre Selena (1996). The songs that came out after. The name says it all.
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La película
The movie
Selena came out in March 1997, with Jennifer Lopez as Selena and Edward James
Olmos as her father. My mom and my sister and I went the first weekend, and the whole theater
was families, abuelas (grandmothers) to babies, and when the lights came up nobody wanted to be
the first one to stand.
What I loved: when Jennifer Lopez sings in the movie, it's Selena's own voice you hear, from her
real records. And the movie shows her family the way they were, a family that worked hard and
fought and laughed and drove all over Texas in a bus together. Jennifer Lopez was nominated for a
Golden Globe for it, and this summer she has a record of her own out. Good for her. I think
Selena would have said the same.
What I didn't love: two hours wasn't enough. But I guess it never would be.
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Mi viaje a Corpus Christi
My trip to Corpus Christi
For spring break 1998 my cousins Patricia, Jessica and Michelle and I drove twelve hours across
Texas in Patricia's car to see the Mirador de la Flor and the bay Selena grew up next to. We
brought white roses. We cried a lot and we laughed even more, and we ate Whataburger more times
than I'm going to admit.
Read about our trip »
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Lo que significa para nosotras
What she means to Tejanas like me
When I was little, I was embarrassed that my Spanish wasn't good enough for my grandmother and my
English wasn't "proper" enough for my teachers. I felt like I was half of two things instead of all
of one. Then here was this girl from Corpus who talked to reporters in English, sang to us in
Spanish, and was still learning her Spanish right in front of everybody, and never let it stop her. She showed us
that being both is not being half. It's being more.
She looked like us. She dressed like she wanted to and she was proud of her body and her family
and where she came from. She never acted like she was too good for a quinceañera in somebody's
backyard. And she was a working girl. She worked so hard.
I'm going to be a nurse. Not a singer, believe me, ask my sister. But every time I stay up late
with my anatomy book, I think about a girl my age riding in a bus all night to sing at a dance in
some little town, then getting up and doing it again. Ganas, my abuela calls it. It means
desire, drive, the will to get somewhere. Selena had ganas. I'm working on mine.
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Another Selena page! There's another one for her right here in Baja Mesa,
named for the album I love. Great minds. Araceli's Siempre Selena is by a
Corpus Christi girl who saw her last Astrodome show, with her life, her songs and a poem. Go visit.
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