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April 16 marks what would have been Selena Quintanilla Perez’s 55th birthday.
The new book, "The Selena Reader," assembles essays, short stories, and poems examining the lasting impact of the Queen of Tejano — 30 years after her death.
TPR’s Marian Navarro spoke with the co-editors of the book, Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa, professor of English at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, and Larissa Mercado-López, Department Chair of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Fresno.
Mercado Lopez began by explaining what sparked the inspiration to collect works for “The Selena Reader.”
Stay tuned to hear more from "The Selena Reader" on a future episode of TPR’s "Fronteras."
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
MERCADO-LÓPEZ: So, we knew that conversations had been happening academically about her. We knew that there continued to be more kind of informal conversations among academics, whether it was talking about her in an analytical way or just about the inspiration that we continue to draw from her.
So, we wanted to create that opportunity for those who had been thinking about Selena within their disciplines to come together and be able to write in a way where they were able to apply frameworks and theories from their disciplines into more kind of analytical conversations about Selena. We know that discussions of Selena are extremely interdisciplinary.
When we're talking about Selena, we're talking about language, right? We're looking at histories of English-only laws. We’re talking about what it means to be Tejana, what it means to be Mexican. These ideas around authenticity. We're talking about mestizaje and constructions of race and gender and sexuality. We're looking more closely at the construction of the genre of Tejano music.
Selena provides us an entry point to explore more these ideas about identity and authenticity and cultural hybridity. We also think about this collection as being just part of that larger memorialization of Selena.
So, it might be academic, but I like to place it within that larger landscape of public remembrances. That’s something that we do in the Mexican American community very well. So, I think about this collection as kind of a literary roadside memorial in that respect.
NAVARRO: The book is actually broken up into three different parts. We have expressions and embodiments of Selena; the public remembrances, so the murals that are dedicated towards her; and then finally, Selena's stories and pedagogies that people carry with them.
So, tell me a little bit about the decision to split up this book into three different parts and examining these three different things.
HINOJOSA: Well, when we were first sort of putting the project together, we really wanted to build a very comprehensive collection by including the reprints. So, Larissa and I had thought about bringing in all those previous publications. But when we sent our call out, we rethought the architecture of the collection based on the submissions we received. And we started to form these areas of how people were having these conversations about Selena.
So, we came up looking at, first, expressions because we wanted to include some creative work. We wanted to embed that creative work throughout the reader, so that the academic pieces also spoke to the creative work. And with that, we broke off those three main parts when we figured that aside from expressions, people are talking about how, say, performers embody Selena or how she's embodied in the artistic murals as part of iconography.
Then we built a section dealing with the public remembrances with a study about the major sites here in Corpus Christi and then found pieces to complement that particular anchor in that section.
Then, we thought of Sonia Aleman’s piece — the Selena course that she designed, and it became part of curriculum at UTSA. We thought then, what pieces relate to this? We had the father-daughter experience of coming of age through Selena stories. Those stories also are embedded throughout the collection.
I remember Larissa and I were working in our introduction, and we were like, “We haven't given our Selena stories!” We embedded a little bit of our stories in the introduction, so that it made a cohesive collection with story throughout.
NAVARRO: When we look at Selena as a figure and her impact, I mean, she died at 23. Her legacy has really outlived the time that she was alive. 30 years after her death, she's still such a popular cultural icon for the Latino community and beyond.
Talk to me a little bit about her ongoing impact and her ongoing legacy, and how highlighting these different stories, perspectives, poems, helps contribute to that.
MERCADO LÓPEZ: Yeah, so I think what you described there was what Deborah Paredez refers to as “Selenidad.” It is the generative afterlife of Selena. It’s the continuous celebrations of Selena, the continuous public remembrances of her. It is the re-fashioning of her, the remaking of her, the transmitting of her.
She continues to be as popular as she is and as known, because we do a very good job in the Mexican American community of passing down memories. I think Selena has provided that opportunity to teach, right, from one generation to the other what it means to be Tejana, what it means to be Mexican, Chicana. We use her songs to teach our younger generation how to dance. We share our memories with her in that way.
The collection is one way in which we continue to not just share her memories — because they're actually not a lot of strong memories of her reflected in the collection of when she was alive — but it's what came afterwards, right?
That's kind of the magic that we're interested in highlighting and looking to see how, you know, our communities through Selena, both collectively grieve her and collectively heal.
HINOJOSA: I would add just what Larissa had mentioned earlier, our "Selena Reader" is definitely sort of a contribution to that collective memorial of Selena.
With that, we hope it engages people to have a story with her — to continue that process of story-making and talking about Selena. Whether, you know, they've learned something through the movie, the biopic "Selena," or the recent documentary that was featured on Netflix, produced by her family.
I would just say that's part of the contribution of the reader is for people to engage with Selena and continue to have a story with her.
