how tall was selena quintanilla

Fans with a photograph of Selena during a ceremony honoring her in 2017. Over the decades since her death, Selena's legacy has become even more profound than writer Deborah Paredez ever anticipated. AFP Contributor/AFP via Getty Images hibernate caption

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AFP Correspondent/AFP via Getty Images

Fans with a photograph of Selena during a ceremony honoring her in 2017. Over the decades since her decease, Selena's legacy has go even more profound than writer Deborah Paredez ever anticipated.

AFP Contributor/AFP via Getty Images

This week marks what would have been the 50th birthday of Selena Quintanilla Perez, the pop musical superstar known by her legions of fans simply as Selena. Though she's been gone for over a quarter century, she seems more than popular than ever. Why is it that 26 years later her expiry at age 23, Selena is experiencing such a remarkable revival? And has she always actually been that far from our thoughts or our playlists?

Twelve years ago, I wrote a volume almost Selena's indelible legacy called Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory . In the process, I discovered how Selena — and Latinos — were transformed by what I came to telephone call Selenidad, the vibrant and dynamic afterlife of this tremendously talented and charismatic performer who was murdered in 1995. In the years since, Selena's legacy has get even more profound than even I could have predictable.

As someone who has spent a long time post-obit the force of Selenidad, I've noticed in the last v years a surge in Selena merchandising and media attention: Andy Warhol-style printed t-shirts at Target, cropped hoodies emblazoned with the slogan, "Selena: Believe the Impossible E'er," at Forever 21, the Selena makeup line that sold out within minutes of its launching at MAC Cosmetics and the multi-episode Netflix show, Selena: The Series . But, every bit Selena fans taught me 25 years ago, we cannot account for the full telescopic and power of Selenidad by focusing only on the officially-canonical stories of her life or the corporate marketing of her prototype.

I was the same age as Selena when she died, both of us members of Generation Ten even every bit the popular markers of that generational category often excluded the experiences or tastes of due south Texas brown girls similar us. When she died, I was struck past the tremendous outpouring of grief and commemoration for Selena that reached beyond those of united states Gen X Tejanas who loved red lipstick and a danceable beat — from Puerto Rican drag queens to elder Salvadoran tías, from the at present collectors' particular People mag tribute event to community vigils in cities across the world. I was in my 2d year of graduate schoolhouse, just beginning to learn how to call back and write critically about functioning and music. Selena's afterlife sharpened my analytical senses, insisting that I wait beyond the proliferation of commodities that help forge an icon in capitalist culture and instead listen closely to the voices that were singing the coda to Selena's life.

The myriad Selena fans I met in the grade of my research taught me that the act of remembering Selena is every bit much an act of creation as citation. Latinos recollect Selena not just to deify a atypical effigy just to forge a sense of community among ourselves beyond the borders of our national, linguistic and regional diverseness. We remember Selena to understand improve who nosotros are as Latinos or Tejanos or Puerto Ricans or Chicanos or Dominicanos or Salvadoreños or every bit whatever combination of these and more beyond the wide spectrum of our identities. We retrieve Selena as a mode of asserting Latina independence, queer Latinx pride, outcries against anti-immigrant policies or claims to civic space and the marketplace.

In an attempt to sympathise this contempo resurgence of Selenidad, I turned to ane of the young people I commencement interviewed for my inquiry nearly twenty years ago: Francisco Vara-Orta, a announcer who now conducts workshops as a Grooming Director at the nonprofit system Investigative Reporters and Editors. Vara-Orta and I first met five years after Selena's passing at the premiere of the short-lived touring musical, Selena Forever, in March 2000, when he was xv years quondam. He recalls, "At that fourth dimension, I was very much starting to come into my sexuality. Juan Gabriel wasn't out. Walter Mercado never really acknowledged information technology. Ricky Martin wasn't out. There was just no representation. So Selena'southward fabulousness, I retrieve, drew a lot of us in: her dance moves, her fashion, her dazzler. ... I learned from her and other popular divas how to navigate my intersectionality—growing up poor, brown, gay, feminine-proud—because there weren't many men that I could wait upward to or respect."

I asked Vara-Orta how and why he thinks Selena's legacy endures. From his perspective equally a millennial who has spent the last 17 years in newsrooms reporting on Latino-related issues in popular culture, business and didactics and who now regularly trains the next generation of Latinx journalists, he posits, "I think nosotros're craving stories non just about trauma but stories about success, and Selena'due south story is at that intersection." Selena's story offers Latinos a way to narrate both our tragedies and our triumphs in the face of the ongoing violence and erasure we experience in larger U.S. civilisation.

Vara-Orta acknowledges the marketplace forces that are cardinal to Selena's persistent afterlife but also observes how continued commemorations of Selena are not just near commodification merely almost cultural preservation. "I feel like Selena's legacy has grown in legitimacy cheers to capitalism in the United States," he says. "I beloved and hate that. I call back that Selena's family is probably pushed and pulled in guarding her legacy and then that it'southward not colonized and appropriated by other forces. I mean, our food'due south been taken from the states, our land'south been taken from us, our bodies are policed, then we're protective of Selena." To lay merits to Selena is to repossess so much of what we've lost as a outcome of centuries of colonialism and cultural cribbing.

Vara-Orta's observations encourage me to acknowledge that the rise in Selena-related products in recent years has also coincided with the ascent in Latina-produced reflections on Selena's lasting impact. In the terminal few years I've fielded an increasing number of interview requests from immature Latinas who are not only interested in hearing well-nigh Selena but in sharing their own experiences of how Selena has inspired their careers as journalists or writers or documentary filmmakers or podcast hosts. Media creators like Mala Muñoz and Diosa Femme (hosts of the Locatora Radio podcast)and Maria Elena Garcia (creator of the Anything for Selena podcast) and Lindsay Graciela Perna (managing director of the short documentary Selena'south Music Saved Their Lives), and Cat Cardenas (journalist and contributor to the recent special effect of Texas Monthly defended to Selena) are just a few of the talented and influential Latinas who are keeping the lights of Selenidad called-for bright.

The piece of work created by this new generation of Latinas — many of whom were children or not yet born when Selena died — is show of the means that, for so many Latinos, Selenidad is our cultural inheritance, something we laissez passer down, a way of making do and evidence of the artistic ways we've endured. For communities who more often than not do not possess generational wealth and who are often divided across national lines past forces of global commercialism, Selenidad is our precious customs heirloom that cannot exist so easily confiscated. An inheritance treasured enough to require safeguarding and capacious enough for all of united states to lay merits to it.

What I've observed over the years is that Latinas and queer communities have been the most constant and creative guardians of Selenidad: mothers teaching daughters the lyrics to Selena songs, gay Tíos styling their nieces in Selena hair and brand-up, Latina butchas adoring the brown femme dazzler modelled afterwards Selena's mode or trans Latinas mentoring others in the ways of Selena-inspired glamour. Vara-Orta concurs, "Gay Latinos accept been a lot of the curators of Selena's legacy over the final 26 years. We dearest Whitney and Madonna and Dolly and Cher and Barbra, but none of them are brown girls. ... I remember the queer community still longs for the next Selena and until we have someone else, we're going to be one of the communities that volition guard her."

This generation of daughters and nieces and baby queers who received their inheritance have now all grown upwards and are, in plow, passing on the gift across a range of media platforms. So it's no surprise to so many brown girls that when Cardi B, the Dominican hip hop diva who grew upward in the Bronx and was only three years quondam when Selena died, announces her arrival in the third poesy of Jennifer Lopez's Latin trap vocal, "Dinero," she proclaims, "I told y'all I'm trap Selena / I'll backhand a b**** like Serena." It'due south no surprise that in the year before the pandemic, I danced to "Dinero" in my Zumba class along with a multi-generational and multi-racial group of women striving each class to follow the moves of our Puerto Rican teacher—a retired backup dancer for Mary J. and Britney and other pop divas—all of us singing along to every discussion. Information technology's no surprise that we knew exactly what kind of brown girl Cardi B was because we were all inheritors of Selena.

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Despite the abundance of Latina talent plant everywhere from podcast airwaves to Zumba classes, the amusement and recording industries still insist on promoting simply a few "Latin stars." Nosotros continue to turn to Selena considering in that location's been no one to replace her. This absence is due non to the paucity of Latina excellence simply the narrow parameters for representation established by these industries — which is exactly what Rita Moreno was getting at when she said, "We can't but let Jennifer Lopez be the sole representative of the Hispanic community." She ways the trouble isn't JLo, but any industry that just makes room for one of u.s.a. at a time. When we elevator Selena, nosotros lift up our collective voices to expand the space to concord u.s.a. all. Equally music scholar Deborah Vargas reminds usa in her book, Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music, in Selena'southward voice we can also hear the voices of Chicana singers who came before her like Eva Garza, Chelo Silva, Rosita Fernandez, Laura Canales, Lydia Mendoza and many others.

Since its beginning, Selenidad has been a reliable barometer for gauging the rise in national policies and inflammatory rhetoric that accept had devastating consequences on Latino lives. Selena died in the eye of the 1990s, a decade that brought with information technology sweeping anti-immigration legislation, the gutting of social welfare programs, deregulation of the telecommunication industries, the passage of the North American Free Merchandise Agreement and the murders of thousands of young women workers along the U.S./United mexican states border. It was as well a time marked by the simultaneous explosion of interest in Latinos as a marketing demographic and prevailing anxieties about the burgeoning Latino population projected by the century'south end to exist the adjacent bulk-minority. In other words, Selena died during a moment that was fraught with tragedy and promise for then many Latinos. Many of us turned to Selena and Selenidad to express our collective grief and joy amidst these larger political and economic forces that shaped our lives.

Selenidad is the space where we get together to mourn the losses we've suffered and to dare to dream of future possibilities in the midst of our tragedies. It's no surprise to me, so, that nosotros experienced a surge in Selenidad during the terminal five years, a time marked past a president who referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and immigrant children detained in cages at the border and Puerto Ricans abandoned by the state in the wake of Hurricane María. Selenidad has long been the identify where we legislate our grief when state legislation has forsaken us. One of the most inspiring examples of this is "Selena for Sanctuary," a series of benefit concerts initiated by a young Latina named Doris Muñoz. In Selena we detect sanctuary.

We turn and render to Selenidad precisely because we cannot turn to the state or to the amusement industry for reliable representation. To plough to Selena is i of the most powerful ways we continue to turn to i another, a form of Latinx mutual aid — sometimes quite literally so, equally Doris Munoz'due south efforts have shown. Selena'due south enduring legacy may point toward the continued commodification of our culture and the lack of imagination among Hollywood or recording executives. Simply it as well offers show that Latinos are however here, struggling and surviving and sustaining one another against the forces that seek to constrain or destroy us. Evidence that we are building our safehouses in Selena'southward retentivity.

Selena has been gone longer than she was here. But she'southward nevertheless with us. She may non take lived long enough to fulfill all of her dreams simply she lives on in the dreams of those who have inherited her. Nosotros return to Selenidad — to the tragedy and promise that the story of Selena's life and decease offers — as a fashion of moving through and making sense of our despair and our dreams. Selenidad is expansive enough to hold it all. Within it nosotros tin hear non just a singular diva's resonant voice, simply a chorus of Latino voices. Listen in. Selenidad is filled with the voices of the next Selenas, with the sounds of and so many others who, as Selena one time sang, "can't finish dreaming."

Deborah Paredez is the author of the recently published poetry volume, Year of the Canis familiaris, and the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. She is co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latinx poets, and a professor of creative writing and indigenous studies at Columbia University. She'south currently at work on a volume about divas.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/16/985827827/selena-at-50-preserving-and-protecting-a-precious-legacy