Sitting in front of a wall covered in drawings of Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, Nathian Rodriguez remembers hearing the news of Selena’s death at his family’s home in the small town of Balmorhea, Texas.
“I remember I was trying to figure out, ‘How am I going to find out this information?’ We only had 13 channels and Univision was one of them, but it wasn’t really covering it,” Rodriguez said. “The nearest Tejano radio station was Midland-Odessa, which was about a two-hour drive from us.”
In order to get a signal to hear the news, he decided to take matters into his own hands — literally.
“And so I remember taking the coaxial cable out of the wall, then I would get the radio and I’d get the antenna, and I’d touch them together,” he said. “So the coaxial cable would give it enough power to pick up this station from Midland-Odessa, so I could hear [the news] live as it was happening.”
Nearly 25 years after his MacGyver-esque efforts, he found himself once again centering part of his life around the Tejano icon, but this time in the classroom. Now serving as an associate director and associate professor in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at San Diego State University, Rodriguez has been teaching a college course about Selena since 2020.
With “Selena and Latinx Media Representation,” as the class is officially known, he is among the growing number of higher education instructors at universities with sizable Latinx populations who are using the “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” singer’s life and legacy as an entry point to explore a plethora of topics in Latinx/Chicanx culture.
“When I created this course, I thought, ‘Well, this is perfect,’” Rodriguez said. “I can think of an example for every single thing that I know about Selena that can relate back to the global flow of music, relate back to the issues of machismo and marianismo, the issues about immigration, the issues about women and how they’re represented and sexualized and hyper-sexualized. There’s ways that I can also relate it back to language and code-switching.”
But what is it about Selena specifically that raises her to the level of scrutiny she has acquired? Sonya Alemán — an associate professor of the Mexican American studies program in the race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality studies department at the University of Texas at San Antonio — surmised that it is, in part, because Selena remains among the few examples of a Latinx star achieving recognition across a wide swath of society.
“She still is the one person in the pop cultural world, in the mainstream, that [Latinx people] can look at that reflects us, that we identify with, that tells our story,” Alemán said. “She’s one of the few that has been allowed in. And so we have to keep coming back to her if we want to have any kind of representation, to feel seen in that way.”
Alemán got the idea to launch her course on Selena at UTSA in fall 2020 after seeing similar courses about music megastars pop up at her university and throughout the country.
“UTSA offered a course for two semesters on Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ album and it was very successful. It had a lot of media attention and students were eager to get into that class.” she said. “Over the course of my career, I’ve seen courses on Harry Potter … I’ve seen courses on Prince. In San Marcos, which is just about 45 miles north of San Antonio, there’s a course on Taylor Swift. There’s a seminar right now at Trinity University [in San Antonio] on Taylor Swift.”
What she really hopes is for her students to be able to learn about themselves and see their own cultural touchstones reflected in Selena’s Mexican American identity.
“So as much as we talk about her, we are also talking about my students’ lives and how they experience the world with that identity,” Alemán noted. “When you can create an educational space that validates values and centers that history and those ways of knowing students have a different level of engagement of learning than they have ever had in another course … and it’s just this thirst that they didn’t even know they had to value their own histories and the knowledge in their community.”
The centerpiece assignment for Alemán’s course functions to directly connect students with their community through a series of interviews with a multigenerational selection of Selena fans. One interview must be with a first-generation fan — someone who was alive while Selena was — and two interviews must be conducted with second-generation fans, who were born after the “Si Una Vez” artist’s death.
Each of her students is tasked with examining their interviews to look for patterns, differences and similarities among the conversations. They are then grouped with two other peers in their class, asked to critically analyze one another’s interviews and create a presentation.
That newly discovered information about Selena fans helps to serve as data points that advance Alemán’s class beyond the somewhat dated media covered in her syllabus.
“We have learned a whole lot about the second-generation set of Selena fans and that knowledge doesn’t exist in the scholarly archive that we use as our course material because they were primarily writing about the first decade and a half after her death,” she explained.
Over the course of the four semesters that she’s taught the class, Alemán’s students have created an impressive database from their roughly 300 self-conducted interviews.
“It’s been incredible to use this course as a way to validate the knowledge that exists in our communities about who [Selena] is and why she matters and to help students see themselves as scholars gathering and making sense of that information,” Alemán said.
Selena’s image and legacy has been used for people to explore more parts of their identity beyond ethnic and cultural ties, as pointed out by Anita Tijerina Revilla, who serves as the department chair and professor of Chicana(o) and Latina(o) studies at Cal State L.A. One way she incorporates Selena into her courses is by looking at the Tejano artist’s impact on the LGBTQ+ community.
Revilla is an expert in Jotería studies, a field of study that examines the lives and histories of queer and gender nonconforming Latinx/Chicanx people. The name of the academic fields serves as an act of reclamation of derogatory terms that have been hurled at queer Latinx folks for decades.
“You can go to any nightclub, see a drag show and expect to see Selena represented,” Revilla said. “For queer people, I think it’s a sense of belonging, a sense of seeing themselves in this woman with her pride in herself as a woman, as a person who is very performance-based … so there’s lots of people who can resonate with her.”
As someone who identifies as queer, Rodriguez also dedicates a considerable amount of time in his course to Selena’s ties to LGBTQ+ culture.
“We look at drag queens and how Selena has become very much this cultural icon for drag queens and for gay men. We look at this idea of the diva and how gay men — whether you’re Mexican American or whatever — what you had in the past to look up to were women,” Rodriguez said.
He also pointed to the song “Amor Prohibido” as having queer undertones with its theme of sharing a love that society isn’t willing to accept.
But no academic conversation about Selena would be complete without discussing the gender dynamics at play with the purple jumpsuit-wearing pop star.
Jose Anguiano, a professor of Chicana(o) and Latina(o) studies at Cal State L.A., commented on how the “Dreaming of You” singer’s life embodied a “quintessential” Chicana story.
“I think a lot of Chicanas relate to the idea of not quite being accepted in the mainstream or having these different expectations put upon you,” Anguiano said of the struggle of being caught between two cultures. “[Selena had] a conservative dad, right? A lot of Chicanos, I think, grew up with a very socially, sexually conservative dad.”
Even after her death, the Quintanilla patriarch has continued to control his daughter’s image.
“He’s tried to shape as best he can and control the narrative around Selena,” Anguiano said. “He’s tried to be the one who gets to tell her story and the family story through the TV show [and movie].”
Rodriguez added to this theme of control of Selena’s image and the gendered implications of it all.
“When we see [family-authorized Selena media], it’s a very controlled narrative that really feeds into this marianismo idea of what a woman is supposed to be. Yes, she was curvaceous and she was bustier and she broke down barriers, but she was also very chaste,” Rodriguez said. Marianismo refers to a traditional and conservative archetype used to describe women from Latin America and its diaspora that’s modeled after the Virgin Mary.
But despite the Quintanilla family’s best efforts, it’s Selena’s loyal fans who have given the music idol ever-growing layers of complexity and have crafted a continuously morphing image of Selena and what she represents in society.
“When [someone] becomes a community folklore hero, it’s up to the community and the fandom to really take control of how we remember them, and they become in some ways a blank canvas to be able to project onto them particular ideas,” Anguiano said. “It’s incredible that 30 years later we’re still talking about her life and it continues to still be significant in the past and for today’s Chicanos and Chicanas.”
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