Como La Flor… Pero No Se Marchita: The Ethics of Keeping Selena Alive

By Samuel Wu

When my mom calls me and tells me that Selena is coming out with a new album, I am mildly surprised that she keeps up with Selena Gomez. My 45-year-old Mexican mother rarely keeps up with pop culture; the alternative, that Selena Quintanilla is coming out with new music, is impossible—this March 31 marked 27 years since Quintanilla was fatally shot by Yolanda Saldivar. And yet as I check the news, I see that Quintanilla, known mononymously as Selena, is indeed coming out with new music. In fact, she is coming out with a whole new album.

While Selena herself is no stranger to posthumous projects—23 albums consisting of compilations, live albums, remixes, and commemorative box sets have been released since her untimely death—Moonchild Mixes is different. Most unintended posthumous projects are typically composed of unreleased music—think The Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death (1997), or Mac Miller’s Circles (2020)—but with those, producers simply finish instrumentation. Here, Selena’s voice itself has been digitally altered by her brother and producer, Abraham (A.B.) Isaac Quintanilla III, in order to make it sound like an adult’s; the lead single, “Como Te Quiero Yo A Ti,” was recorded when Selena was just 13 years old but was matured through digital modification.

The ethical grounds for releasing unintended posthumous projects are shaky at best—Brett Morgen released “Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings”, a documentary full of half-finished songs by Kurt Cobain, as a tribute to the late artist, arguing “would you hide a Picasso sketch?” Morgen was then criticized for not only invading Cobain’s private space, but also profiting off it. “Seeing it—or hearing it—is one thing. Selling it is another. And who gets to answer that question? A dead artist? A profiteering executor? A ravenous public?” Fidel Martinez pointed to the hologram of Whitney Houston as the uncomfortable evidence that the dead will not rest when there are records to be sold, asking, when it comes to the fandom, where do we draw the line? With the processing of Selena’s vocals, does the question matter if Selena herself isn’t even talking? However, even Martinez is quick to point out that if a hypothetical festival lineup of Selena and other iconic dead Latin musicians like Ritchie Valens, Celia Cruz and Chalino Sánchez were to come to fruition, he would be buying a ticket to the hypothetical Bésame Mucho music festival. And with the recent release of Netflix show Selena: The Series (2020) and the looming parole eligibility date of Saldivar, the album comes at a delicate time for many fans. Melissa Lozada-Oliva, author of Dreaming of You, wrote in Vulture that the album is like being at “a theme park named Selena, buckled into a metal contraption shaped like a rose, getting closer and closer to a smiling version of the star with wires in her chest and washers in her cheeks.”

Despite comments by biographer Joe Nick Patoski calling the commercialization of Selena what “happens when your father is your manager,” the Quintanilla family maintains their position that not only are they honoring Selena, but this is what she herself would have wanted. According to A.B. and Selena’s sister Suzette, they had collectively agreed with Selena that if anything were to happen to any one of them, it was their mission to keep the legacy alive; in fact, A.B. claims that one of Selena’s wishes was for her to never go away. To A.B., Moonchild Mixes fulfills that wish, honoring her memory and legacy and reinforcing Selena’s ability to transcend generations. Allegations that Moonchild Mixes was just another easy cash grab by a family struggling to stay relevant are met with the defense that they are keeping Selena’s legacy alive, allowing the public to discover Selena again through these new forms of media by and about her. But the question that initially asks what Selena would have wanted prompts another inquiry: how important is the voice of the dead in their own legacy?

Very few artists have been quite as immortalized as Selena. As the Queen of Tejano Music, the Mexican Madonna, and a Tex-Mexican through and through, her story has always been fragmented identities put together to make a whole, a physical and aural iteration of the inherent muddy political nature of borders. Entre a mi Mundo, she said on her third studio album, claiming space on both sides of the borders of music and land, blatantly blurring where the binary begins and where it breaks. To this point, Sarah Misemer wrote in The Brown Madonna: Crossing the Borders of Selena’s Martyrdom how Selena’s music expanded the discourse, both in the 90s as well as today, on what it means to have a foot in multiple worlds, to occupy cultural space in both the United States and Mexico—revealing the tenuous mirage of the “border” between the two. “There is no denying the tremendous impact that [Selena] and her music had on border culture,” Misemer wrote. “[Her] iconization is the result of particular factors that cause questions of identity and themes of border crossing to surface repeatedly in the Chicano and Latino communities.” It is not the straddling of two worlds that makes Selena so important, but rather how she developed and shaped discourse on using the binary to find an identity. Identity became not a separation between the self and the Other, but in her concurrent existence, a melding between the within and without of the binary—she was a Mexican, born in America; she sang in Spanish yet struggled with conversational Spanish; to her, the binary existed both as the backdrop and the central leading point of her career.

 Selena’s untimely death, while tragic, did spark a revolution in the Latin diaspora. The trial was followed closely by the Latin community, although many Americans who were unaware of the singer criticized the attention she and her murder received from the media. To this, Lourdes Portillo, director of Corpus: A Home Movie about Selena, commented, “Here comes a brown woman, very beautiful and very talented, taking up a space that had never been filled by someone else. She represented people that traditionally had not had a presence. I think that is her real importance.” Indeed, when her death was announced, people traveled thousands of miles to visit her home, boutiques, and the crime scene. Churches with large congregations of Latinos held prayers in her name, and two weeks after her death, the then-Texas governor George W. Bush declared her birthday Selena Day in Texas. Record sales went up for months after her death, and all over, people mourned the death of an icon.

It is undeniable that Selena’s relevance in pop culture grew exponentially because of her death. In Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, literary critic Elisabeth Bronfen explores the aesthetic fascination that society has with the dead feminine: by dying, she wrote, women become a site of looking into death. The living, acting as the spectator, can simultaneously feel a closeness to the articulated mortality of humanity, while also acknowledging the distance between them and the subject. “The death of a beautiful woman emerges as a requirement for a preservation of existing cultural norms and values,” Bronfen wrote. “Over her dead body, cultural norms are reconfigured or secured, whether because the sacrifice of the virtuous, innocent woman serves a social critique and transformation or because a sacrifice of the dangerous woman reestablishes an order that was momentarily suspended due to her presence.”

The femininity of Selena was particularly important because she was occupying a space not intended for her; for Latinas, Selena’s success spoke even louder because she was also dominating in a traditionally male-dominated area. “The desire to see is a manifestation of the desire to be seen,” Peggy Phelan wrote in Unmarked, “in live performance as well as in…inanimate representation”; as a woman of color in fame’s spotlight, Selena had to exist as something larger than life to be taken seriously by her predominantly white, male peers. Selena, both as herself and her music, represented the ushering in of a new age for women, specifically Latinas, in a way that they hadn’t seen before. And with artists such as Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce, Selena Gomez, Becky G, and more citing Selena as an inspiration, it is understandable the desire to keep Selena alive.

And for Selena, being not just “woman” but “Latina” figured as an essential part of her identity and death. For Diana Taylor, author of Dancing with Diana: A Study in Hauntology, race continues to matter, even after death. Taylor compared the reception to Selena’s death to that of Princess Diana, citing scathing remarks made by prominent radio host Howard Stern: “Selena? Her music is awful. I don’t know what Mexicans are into. If you’re going to sing about what’s going on in Mexico, what can you say?… You can’t grow crops, you got a cardboard house, your 11-year-old daughter is a prostitute … This is music to perform abortions to!” Stern did face massive backlash from the Latino community and later apologized for his comments, but his lack of empathy reflects a truth to Taylor’s claim. Selena’s death is “too lowly to constitute a drama,” Taylor wrote. “It’s reduced to an incident [and] relegates Selena to the ignominy of particularism: poverty, deviance, genocide.”

Stern set himself up as one of the “migra” of the imaginary, a border police seeking to reaffirm their charge, ensuring that certain persons don’t sneak into dominant culture. To Stern, Selena was a Latina before she was a popstar; the established narrative is that Latinos are poor, they die every day—Selena’s story offers no counter. Dying at the hand of her own kind, Selena does not command respect like Princess Diana, who is invoked in hushed, reverential terms. Here, Diana was a member of the British royal family before she was a white woman; there is an uncanniness, an unnaturalness to Diana’s death—to die young, much less in a car accident, is not the established narrative for royalty. To apologize for this, Diana is crowned an afterlife as a saint; she is guaranteed a visa because by reinforcing borders, Diana is able to travel where she pleases. On the flip side, Selena continues into the afterlife as a martyr; her disregard for the border in life is canceled out in death—the migra of the imaginary have caught up, and now the border can be rebuilt. The inherent nature of borders is to divide; to transgress this cultural norm is to redraw the line in the sand. There is an urgency to memorialize, to draw new maps and claim new borders. However, all this does not come without opposition—new borders inhabit the carcasses of old borders, and to live within the new borders is to be subject to these hauntings.

There is a responsibility placed on the dead woman: now the “other,” she exists as a pawn in a game over which she has no agency nor consciousness, and she is manipulated to an extent that was not possible when she was alive. There is a burden, whether justifiable or not, that was cemented the moment Selena was iconized: robbed of so much potential, to let her go is to spit not only on her gravestone, but on the Latin community as well. But in the repeated exhumation of her image, both for memory and capital, a seemingly insensitive comment like “just let her die” does pose an important question: when, if even possible, will Selena be enough? 

To freeze Selena as the ever-smiling 23-year-old singer moments before her death is to offer a rewrite of the narrative, an opportunity very few get. Left to its own devices, Selena’s death reinforces the Latino narrative of internal divisiveness, but to make her something more than her death is to break that narrative. Perhaps this is why the Quintanilla family is so adamant to keep Selena relevant; suspended in now 24 posthumously released soundtracks, compilations, live albums, remixes, and commemorative box sets, Selena must exist to prove that the Latino legacy is not one that ends in tragic death, but one that can be celebrated. With songs like “Dame tu Amor”, “No Llores Más”, and “Soy Amiga”, it is clear that Moonchild Mixes, at its very best, offers a cathartic relief to a grieving community. At its worst, it is a reflection of just how unclear our responsibilities are as consumers. Perhaps her father says it best in an interview promoting the album: “With Selena, it wasn’t just the music. It was the person”; it is no longer enough to consume Selena’s music—we must consume Selena the Person™. Either way, Selena has always said it best: “Como la flor/ Con tanto amor/ Me diste tú/ se marchitó/…Yo sé perder/ Pero ah-ah-ay, cómo me duele.”