From Her Over-Controlling Father to Being Disliked by Many, This Is the Story of Selena Quintanilla

Selena Quintanilla may be one of the most successful Latina music artists of all time, but the path to stardom wasn’t an easy one.

When she first began to break through in the Tejano music market, many believed she would never gain a foothold as a woman. At the time, Tejano music, also known as Tex-Mex music, was dominated by male artists. No one could imagine that a woman would have any appeal, but boy were they wrong.

In 1992, when Selena was only 21 years old, she eloped with her guitarist, Chris Perez. They had previously shown affection publicly, but were forced to make their relationship a secret when Selena’s father forbid them from seeing each other.

Instead, they decided to marry one another in secret. Selena believed that her father might be more accepting if they were married. The plan backfired after the media publicized their nuptials. Selena was subsequently estranged from her father for some time.

In a scathing tell-all that was published several years after Selena’s death, her biographer revealed that there were some who believed Selena was planning on running away with her doctor when she died.

The claim stems from the fact that a suitcase was found in her hotel room that had been packed with all of her clothes alongside a work permit for Mexico. Though Ricardo Martinez maintains the two had a romantic relationship, Selena’s family considers the claim a lie.

During her short time in the public eye, Selena not only built herself a music career, but was also building a career in fashion. Before her death, she owned several fashion boutiques around Texas.

However, it seems that her business practices weren’t always up to snuff. One of the allegations that emerged against her was that she would arbitrarily fire employees that she disliked for purely personal reasons. Some think this may have even contributed to her death.

When Selena was just beginning her career, she met a young girl at a Houston show. Seeing such a confident star surely had an impact on the Texas native, who we now also know by only her first name: Beyonce.

Beyonce explained just how much of an impact Selena had on her when she was younger, adding that she was a little star struck to be meeting the performer, even before she was a mega star.

One of the elements that made Selena’s story so inspirational to those who followed her career was that she came from humble beginnings. An economic downturn in the early 1980s left her family bankrupt when their restaurant failed.

As they worked to improve their fortune, Selena’s father would often only go to the grocery store at night because he didn’t want anyone to know that the family needed to rely on food stamps in order to eat.

After Selena’s death, her hometown of Corpus Christi in Texas wanted to name a street after the beloved singer. However, the city planners soon discovered there was a hitch in their plan.

One of the streets that intersected the road that would be named Selena was called “Yolanda.” That’s the same name as the woman who killed Selena. The government officials knew that plan would never work, which led to the initiative being dropped. However, she was commemorated in other ways.

Selena may be known for her Spanish-language music, but given that she was born and raised in Texas, her first language was actually English. When she first began singing Tejano music, she had to use phonetic spellings in order to pronounce the Spanish.

Though she did eventually learn to speak the language, she was very clearly speaking it as a second language. That didn’t change her popularity among the Latino population in America, however, as she also gained a foothold in Mexico too.

When the 1997 biopic about Selena first when into production, a search was launched across the country to find an actress with the skills to sell Selena onscreen.

Young hopefuls flocked to the audition, making the search for Selena the second best attended casting call of all time. When all was said and done, over 21,000 actresses had auditioned for the role. The only casting call that saw more actresses was the one for Scarlett O’Hara.

Yolanda Saldivar wasn’t just Selena’s murderer. She was also the president of the pop star’s fan club. Getting the official fan club off the ground wasn’t exactly an easy task, however, as Yolanda had to convince Selena’s father Abraham to accept her proposal.

It took roughly 15 calls from Saldivar before he relented on the fan club. She had ultimately convinced him that it would help her career to have an official fan club. In hindsight, maybe he should have remained firm.

After Salvidar’s push to create the official Selena fan club, the family didn’t seem to dig too deep into her past. Instead, she became close to the entire family, which led them to overlook the $9,000+ she had stolen from a previous employer.

Yolanda’s misdeeds wouldn’t end up being a one time slip up. Shortly before Yolanda killed the singer, the Quintanillas discovered that she’d embezzled nearly $30,000 from fans who had written in to receive official Selena merchandise.

Dr. Ricardo Martinez began his rapport with Selena as a financial advisor, but quickly became a trusted ear she could rely on. In recent years, rumors have cropped up that allege Martinez as having acted in the capacity of a medical doctor to Selena as well.

His claims even go so far as to reveal that he may have performed liposuction on the star. At her young age, however, it’s highly possible that the rumor has no basis in the truth.

While their music styles couldn’t have been more different, at the peak of her career, Selena was often called the Mexican Madonna. Much of the moniker came from the way Selena dressed for her concerts.

She would often make pieces herself by bedazzling regular lingerie with extra beads and sequins. In terms of the place they held within popular consciousness in their respective genres, both were equally influential. It’s Selena though, who may take the prize for the barriers she broke down.

By the time the Quintanillas realized that there was something seriously wrong with Yolanda, she was deeply embedded not just as a close friend to the family, but as a major player in their business ventures.

It wasn’t simply that they uncovered her wrongdoing. Apparently, Yolanda’s brother, Armando, was the first one to sound the alarm. He told the designer that worked on the line Selena sold in her boutiques about what his sister was up to before the info reached the Quintanillas.

Selena had a peculiar collection that was inspired by her fame. Much like the fallen Russian monarchy before her, she had a habit of collecting Faberge eggs. By the time she died, she had over 500 of the jeweled eggs in her collection.

These valued items weren’t pieces that she’d trot out only on special occasions. Selena kept them all on display in her living room. After her death, however, they were moved into a museum, displayed exactly how Selena had maintained them.

While Selena’s family was in the depths of their poverty, there was a period of time when they were sharing their house with around 13 people total. While that might sound like a nightmare in itself, there was something that made it worse.

The house only had one bathroom for all of the residents to share. It was Selena and her siblings’ music career that finally set them back on track to being financially sound.

As the Quintanilla siblings began to find some semblance of success as a musical group, their father needed a way to facilitate their tours. They eventually earned enough money for him to buy a bus, which he was able to refit to become their tour bus.

Even after the renovations, however, the bus was far from a luxurious place to stay. Big Bertha, as they named the bus, had no heating or air conditioning, nor did they have running water or a bathroom.

Selena’s husband, Chris Perez, has continued to find that his late wife is bringing him nothing but heartache. Several years ago, he wrote a memoir as a tribute to the wife he lost so soon.

Perez wanted to turn his memoir into a TV show about Selena’s life, but instead, he ended up in a legal battle with her father. Despite appealing the first ruling, Perez lost both cases, as the Quintanillas own all media reproductions of Selena.

Shortly before she died, Selena was in the final stages of closing on a house in Mexico. Though she had begun to spend a fair amount of time in the Mexican media as she became more famous, Selena’s connection with the country was more ancestral.

As her profile rose, however, it seemed she wanted to strengthen the ties to the country, especially as the number of Mexican fans she had grew. Her death put a wrench in those plans.

Mexico may be a Catholic nation, but somehow the Quintanilla family became Jehovah’s Witnesses at some point after arriving in the United States.

The young Selena was raised in the faith, which definitely affected the kind of music she chose to sing. At the same time, it was Selena and her siblings’ music career that was keeping food on their table, even though some saw the demands of the career as inappropriate for a girl as young as Selena was.

Selena chose to begin singing Tejano music at the suggestion of her father, who wanted her to show off her roots as she built her stage persona.

However, many of the Tejano music venues scattered about Texas refused to let the band play at all. Some cited the kids’ ages as the deciding factor, but given that Selena was their front woman, the entire Quintanilla family knew it was simply because they weren’t used to a woman singing that kind of music.

In 2006, Selena’s killer gave a rare interview from behind bars. She was further questioned on the dismissed rumors that Selena was pregnant when she shot her.

According to this friend-turned-killer, she had promised Selena she would “take this secret to the grave.” She added, “People that don’t want to know the personal life of Selena, and only care about the celebrity aspect, are not doing her any justice because she suffered a lot.”

While we assume that Selena was a happy star, according to her fan and killer, she was struggling. She said that fans did not know the same Selena as she did.

She saw a woman who was struggling with the weight of expectation on her shoulders, personally and professionally. “The public believes that Selena was always so happy and cheerful but she wasn’t,” she revealed. “I saw her cry.” The information was new to husband, Chris Perez.

Back in 1992, Selena married Chris Perez, the latest member of her band “Los Dinos.” It did not take long for the Tejano star and Perez to fall in love, despite disapproval from her father.

According to Chris, “the main reason for that was it kind of hurt his pride and his ego to find out that he was the last to know.” The worst part for Chris was when Selena’s father said that he was “like a cancer to his family.”

Nevertheless, Selena Quintanilla and Chris Perez went ahead and married in a very personal and private ceremony.

Pictures were never released of the celebration and many would continuously speculate on what her wedding dress looked like or how the day was decorated… until now. Never before seen photos of the day have been released. One photo shows Selena walking down the aisle in her short white dress and another shows herself with her parents and her new husband.

To Selena, education was important. It was important to her to promote to her fans and the world that education is everything.

She was once quoted saying, “Music is not a very stable business. You know it comes and it goes, and so does money. But your education stays with you for the rest of your life.” In November 1994, Selena introduced an educational video for students at Cunningham Middle School, in which she talks about the importance of staying in school.

Abraham Quintanilla may have recognized Selena’s talent when she was as young as six, but that didn’t mean he could spare the change to pay for her performance training.

Selena’s inherent talent made her success even more impressive, but she did share that she picked up some of her moves from television. One of her favorite shows was Soul Train, which she used as an inspiration for much of her choreography in the early years of her performance career.

Selena’s life was well-preserved in the 1997 biopic that starred Jennifer Lopez in her first major acting role. However, more than 20 years later, Netflix is working on a new television show that details the story of Selena’s tragically short life with the help of her surviving family members.

In the meantime, a Mexican series was released in September 2018 that promised to reveal secrets about her life that had never been heard before. Her family, naturally, did not approve.