Selena Quintanilla

Full Text:

For most people in the United States, Selena was introduced posthumously. On March 31, 1995, Selena Quintanilla Perez was shot and killed by the president of her fan club, Yolanda Saldivar, in her Texas hometown of Corpus Christi. As Selena was rushed to the hospital, where she soon was pronounced dead, Yolanda Saldivar held police at bay in the parking lot of the motel where she had shot Selena, a gun pointed to her own head. After more than nine hours, she surrendered. Meanwhile, hundreds had gathered to watch the drama unfold, and television cameras arrived that sent images of the standoff to stations all over the country. When Selena's death was announced, images of the tejana singer in her glittering bustiers and skin-tight sequined outfits flashed behind announcers who were relating the news that she had been shot. But who was Selena? This was the question that millions of non-tejanos were asking. Who was the woman who had caused such a sensation?

Many members of the media were also asking this question. Since consumer-based telecommunications blocs abhor (usually self-created) information voids, there occurred a demand for sources that could deliver commentary on tejano music and culture. The media's immediate task was to supply a point of reference that would provide media audiences with an understanding of the slain singer. This task was accomplished with an initial label: Selena was "the Tex-Mex Madonna." This label was handy, easily understood, and totally inaccurate. This label did not reflect the tejano experience or understanding of Selena. As information from tejanos about Selena's life and values surfaced in the popular media, the Madonna-Selena connection became increasingly problematic. Eventually the label was dropped for the more accurate "Queen of Tejana Music." In this article we argue that among the social-cultural repositionings in the aftermath of Selena's death, followers of United States popular culture encountered a reading of Selena that reconceptualized the image of the sexily dressed woman. The movement from the first label to the second represents a brief moment of cultural openness in the otherwise frenzied commodification of the late singer.

Dress, the Body, and Sexuality

A familiar visiting point in most surveys of communication is the topic of nonverbal meaning. We confidently assert what to us is a straightforward axiom: dress communicates. But beyond this, issues are not as confidently resolved. Dress communicates far more than an individual's preference or style. After all, a person cannot choose from what is unavailable. Something is unavailable because it is unmade (unthought), it is unaffordable (unselectable), or it is taboo (undesirable to design/manufacturing centers). In each instance, the factors surrounding what a person chooses to wear originate beyond, and manifest within, the person's social environment. Hence, the wearer's appearance implicates a complex set of social prescriptions and expectations. What Deetz (1990) has observed about technology also holds for dress; it is a "materialized ideology" (p.48 ).

If dress tells us what is preferred in a society, then the wearer communicates an acceptance of or opposition to a society's norms. Arthur (1993) notes that "Dress, and by extension, the body are sites where different symbolic meanings are constructed and contested" (p. 66). Dress is political; it visualizes and makes mobile regions of discord and tension.

Images of Selena invited quick inferences because her typical stage wardrobe included costumes which are generally considered "skimpy" and "flashy". The symbolic meaning often constructed for this type of dress is one of a "loose" woman of low repute who sexually accessible. Arthur's (1993) ethnography of Mennonite women found that their clothing was often used to "control" them, and that clothing was often associated with sexual behavior. One member whom she interviewed noted that "If you're single, clothes are for sexual attraction, but you can't be too obvious. Once you've caught a man, there's no need to put so much time in extensive wardrobes" (p. 79). Among the Mennonites, as among other religious communities, clothing signifies a woman's sexuality. Wilson (1993) notes that clothing often "stands in" for the body. Body and clothes combine to create "appearance" (p. 51). Because of this combination, what is attributed to the clothing is many times extended to the woman. Women who wear clothes which are seen as provocative, sexy, loud, and flashy, often find themselves similarly described.

Selena has been described as "sexy" (Richmond, 1995), "smoldering" (Selena: In death..., 1995), "passionate" (Sanz & Cortina, 1995, p. 38), "flirtatious" (Selena, 1995), and as "a sexy, writhing vixen" (Selena, 1996, p. 47). These descriptions became qualities ascribed to her by the mainstream media, and these descriptions were summarized in the names: "Tex-Mex Madonna", the "Latin Madonna", and the "Mexican Madonna". This naming allowed those attributes often ascribed to Madonna -- sexually explicit, dominating, disrespectful -- to also become associated with Selena. The non-latino audience, through the label of the Tex-Mex Madonna, took its understanding of Madonna as sexually explicit and sexually provocative and now had a way to interpret the images of Selena in news accounts of her life.

Voices of the Tejanos

For many Mexican Americans the Selena-Madonna pairing was jarring. A brief anecdote illustrates this. The second author of this essay was talking about Selena with his cousin. He described how press accounts were comparing Selena to the material-vogueing-papa don't preach-Antonio Banderas desiring girl. "Madonna?" the cousin asked, perplexed. "Do they mean la Virgen?" The association of Selena to la Virgen de Guadalupe (a reference to the miraculous appearance of Jesus' mother in Mexico) makes sense from within a perspective that reconciles sexuality and filial devotion.

As the Anglo media mined tejano opinion about Selena, voices emerged that countered the provocative depiction of Selena. From the tejano community, there came stories of Selena as "the girl next door." One disc jockey described Selena as a girl "from the barrio... She still ate tortillas and frijoles" (Selena, 1995, p. 6). Stories filled the airways told by neighbors who described how she would walk her dogs in the unassuming neighborhood of Bloomington St. where, incidentally, Selena lived next door to her parents and across the street from her brother. She was described as a family member by fans from California to Texas. Her father described her as "a genuinely good person - she was clean, she stood for family" (Powell, 1995, p. 26). Jose Behar, president of EMI Latin, Selena's record label, recalls her as "a good innocent kid... who had a wonderful upbringing" (Ciabattari, 1995). Images such as these, of Selena as a clean-living, down-to-earth person, also began to fill the airways. Tejanos from all over the country mourned the loss of a sister or daughter, not a sexual fantasy.

Because Selena was so unknown outside of the tejano community, the media were forced to go to the tejano people for information, and were permitted to give a space to voices which were not typically heard in the mainstream media. Sandra Harding (1995) describes the trials marginalized groups must go through in order to have their voices heard. "Members of marginalized groups must struggle to name their own experiences for themselves in order to claim the subjectivity, the possibility of historical agency, that is given to members of dominant groups at birth" (p. 128). In this moment of tragedy, tejanos were able to name their experiences and write their own histories of Selena and their own tejano culture. Richmond (1995) notes that "For most of the reporters, figuring out what "Tejano" means was [a challenge]. Suddenly, a few Texas music critics and writers became the journalists de jour [sic] for the United States." (p. 100). Those who were once on the fringes of the mainstream media, if they can even be placed there, had suddenly been thrust to the center, their voices becoming the voices of authority.

But the tejano journalists were not the only voices heard in the mainstream media. Many of the tejano people expressed their joys and sorrows in special ways, and the media splashed many of the heartfelt messages throughout the country. Bilingual descansos (resting places), or shrines built to honor Selena were pictured on news broadcasts and in print. The media showed fans visiting her grave to be healed and described fan's sightings of Selena's spirit offering encouragement and hope for the poor (Blosser, 1995, p. 24-5). Fans with tears in their eyes described the impact she had had on their lives. Most celebrated was Selena's strong tie to the tejano community and to her family.

The Contradiction of Selena

With the introduction of the tejano voices into the mainstream media, journalists, and many non-latinos who had never heard of Selena, were faced with contradictory discourses. These discourses described Selena as "a teasing, curvy siren with girl-next-door accessibility" (Selena, 1996) who simultaneously maintained conservative family values. In a tribute issue to her, People magazine described her as

... smoldering, flirtatious and passionate, yet she once

turned down a role in a Mexican soap opera because it

...