THE SELENA READER

An academic look at the legacy of the Tejano music legend.

When Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the mega-popular Tejano singer, was murdered in 1995 by the president of her fan club, it tore a hole in the heart of the music world that still exists today. As Mercado-López and Hinojosa, the editors of this anthology, write, “Selena remains ever-present through myriad forms of cultural production, capitalism, personal expression, political expression, and collective grief and remembrance.” The essays collected here center on “Selenidad,” which “captures the collective memory, performances, cultural practices, artifacts, or symbolic figures that have emerged around Selena since her death.” In one essay, Sarah De Los Santos Upton and Leandra H. Hernández consider Selena through “nepantla identity,” or the way people in borderlands navigate their identities, arguing that her music is “better understood through the concept of cruzando frontejas, or a crossing over the Texas-Mexico border.” Ruben Ernesto Zecena contributes a fascinating essay about Selena as a “Diva Latina” and how some approaches to her work “make Latinidad reckon with queer desires, fantasies, and longings,” while Susan Garza, Kristina Gutierrez, and Danyela Fonseca offer a well-researched piece about memorials to the singer in the city where she was raised, Corpus Christi, Texas. The collection closes with a beautiful poem by Rossy Evelin Lima: “There’s a seed of your spirit / in every shimmering sequin that stitches / bright pride onto brown skin.” This is an academic anthology, and its contributors frequently make use of social-science jargon that is likely to put off fans hoping for more straightforwardly personal reflections on the singer, but readers interested in a more in-depth, scholarly approach to Selena will likely find much to admire here. Mercado-López and Hinojosa have done an excellent job bringing together a diverse range of intelligent and engaging writers.

Perceptive, if at times dense.