'Como La Flor' author opens up about Selena and the Quintanillas

it's an amazing story of a woman that was determined that succeeded against so many odds and was this role model uh when there were no role models [Music] he's the man who wrote the book the definitive book on the late tejano star selena quintanilla perez joe nick patoski was probably in the best position of anyone in the state who could have written that book he knew selena from his days as a texas monthly writer he had done a number of interviews with her and actually had to convince them that she was worth putting on the cover of the magazine which then became one of its biggest sellers ever he goes into great detail in this interview about what he knew of her from before and then what he found out in his research and his dealings with the family hope you enjoy this interview again this is joe nick patoski the writer of the book on selena i guess my introduction to selena came by listening to her music and recordings i had been writing about music since the early 1970s and in the 1990s i was a staff writer at texas monthly magazine and she was on my radar i followed mexican american music in texas really going back to i was interested in conjunto music to laonda chicana which basically was the predecessor to tejano and then in the late 1980s it witnessed kind of this explosion of tejano music a lot of bands coming up not just selena but certainly emilio la mafia uh grupo maz these were all becoming big acts i mean that were selling not just ten thousand records anymore but over a hundred thousand units they were getting noticed in the national media and by international record companies so that by the end of the 1980s you had all the major labels that had released latin music were coming in to sign texas acts as well as all the bands were doing deals with beer companies and most notably selena did a deal with coca-cola the first mexican-american female certainly in this part of the world to do an endorsement deal with the number one soft drink in the world and so as a writer covering music i would had been blind for this to escape my attention and i'd always liked uh i'd like the regional music that came out of texas i was always following it so i had written about a feature in texas monthly about little joe i'd written about uh steve jordan esteban jordan for mother jones magazine so here along comes and like i've seen i've written about flacco jimenez i've seen some people that i think are pretty significant but when selena started winning tejano music awards and selling out the alamo dome for those award ceremonies drawing 50 50 000 people and she's winning all the awards that caught my attention and i started listening to the music and following it and i to the point that in 1994 texas monthly magazine is going to start a new thing the texas 20. the 20 most significant texans of this year and kind of like a you know to show that we're hip and in the know and i was kind of the entertainment guy at the editorial board meetings and understand it's an all anglo editorial board at the time this is 1994. and when it comes to entertainment everybody looks at me it's like well who should we be doing and i said selena and everybody kind of gave me these blank stares who huh and i said all you need to know is her last album has outsold zz top and willie nelson and that's really all you need to know this is why she is worth writing about and i did a short profile on her as one of the texas 20 that year and of course nine months later she's dead and you know i had one interview on her bus before a gig in austin to do this profile and was completely blown away just one is is she was she hadn't gone on stage yet she hadn't done her stage prep no makeup and i'm here to tell you this is one of the most beautiful women i'd witnessed i mean i'm melting right there i'm a reporter and i'm trying to get a story but she's already got me kind of like going like this i just couldn't believe the natural beauty which i never saw before in all her pictures and all of her stage gear but she was so at ease and natural and then over the next course of the next hour talking about all kinds of things and one is it was very clear she was in control because at one point her father who was sitting on a bus bench nearby listening to us volunteered something to say something and she said hush dad i'm talking and this is her show but it was very telling that what she really wanted to talk about was not so much the crossover that was in process she was recording with english language producers she was going to do an english language album and it kept getting delayed because she was blowing up and she had so many demands on her time but what she wanted to talk to me about was you know i've got these boutiques and i've got this fashion line that i'm fixing to roll out and she showed me her sketches and talked about how much she loved fashion and you know these were her businesses and what really struck me long after the fact about that encounter is that was her thing the the boutiques and and drawing uh you know doing creating a fashion line that was all her deal the band selena elos dinos that was her dad's dream he had los dinos abraham quintanilla was in the original los dinos who encountered frustrations because of this english spanish language dividing the cultural divides in in texas in the late 50s and early 60s and so he never got to realize his dream and early on he taught his kids how to play uh how to perform he named them los dinos after his band and what those kids did is they were growing up from elementary school all the way to high school and beyond was basically live out abraham's dream and selena who grew up in the family band is part of this this was her life the fashion thing was her her deal it was her one thing that she had that was hers and it really made me uh it made me realize how hard it was the life she was living when you're on the road you're playing gigs and certainly someone that's going to high school junior high she's never around for the dances or to date guys she's not working every weekend and you know it's a cloistered existence in a way to which you know that sort of explains how yolanda saldivar appeared and and offered to be the fan club president and and and sort of by default became if not one of celina's best friends her very best friend because she was always there so people don't think about that when you think about you know a life in music you know performing and doing all this it's hard i've i've managed bands and i've gotten to see this up close it's really hard and it's wearing and for the family unit to stay together and for them to work as they did as a family is it's it's a an admirable feat but i also know that it was like you know this woman didn't have uh the childhood most of us had she was busy performing you said fashion was her dream what did you get from her in that regard as to what she wanted to do with that dream well uh my sense was i mean and she made it clear to me fashion's my dream this is what i've always wanted to do this is what i used to sketch as a kid you know it's kind of going beyond dolls and getting serious and it did get serious there were there was a boutique that was opened in corpus and then one uh famously on on broadway street very prestigious location and it wasn't just fashion designs or things she liked she was starting up a fashion line she had met martin gomez a fashion designer and he was working at dillard's and it's like when these two people met it was like fellow travelers they both had you know the same same exuberance for you know sketching and and you know doing dresses and things like this and so martin kind of came aboard and they were developing a line that was going to be manufactured in monterey and this was getting you know it was beyond the boutiques this was going to be any department store would have fashions by selena and they would have her dress line in it most of which were done by martin and martin did a lot of her stay he he designed her stage wear but it was also it was but it was always with selena's input so it wasn't like martin's just doing these things hey selena look at this it it was truly a collaborative venture and so that's the creative part of it and then the other creative aspect is there she's running a business she's running two businesses there's a lot of money going through these businesses people are they know about it it's kind of they're kind of famous they're not just boutiques they're this is selena's boutique she's kind of she's she's known in certain quarters that she's already a superstar so people are going just to look at what she's got to to sell and this is a powerful thing i mean if she didn't have her music career this might have been and it could have been her whole life but she also at the same time had this music career that was just beginning to go crazy she it was expanding so rapidly and capital emi is is is set the best producers in the world on her and she's working all kinds of different sessions people are hearing about it they know about her and when i talked to her on that bus i remember walking out and telling someone at texas monthly uh you know hey she's not just going to be the next gloria stefan and i think she's gonna be a lot bigger than gloria stefan but she's she's you know madonna better watch out because that's what kind of pop sensibility she had and you know i don't care what language she was singing at she's what language she was singing in at the astrodome in houston but 70 000 fans can't be wrong i mean that's when you see the the astrodome concert shortly before uh she passed that's really seen her at the height of not just her her singing abilities and performing abilities stage presence but just her connection with the fans i mean she had it going on and this is what really hurts is to see that and to see this this ascend this this upward curve and you know it's going so much higher but instead it's just cut off and that's the sad part she became famous in death selena became famous in death but i'm here to tell you had she lived she would have been a lot bigger than she is right now her death was such a profound experience and it started for me with a phone call about 11 11 30 that day from my friend david bennett who was a reporter at the san antonio express news he always had some kind of bad jokes and it was like selena's been shot and i said david you're a day ahead of april fools and that's not very funny and he said no it just came over the wire really and there was nothing else and then uh probably about 45 minutes passed and david called again and said she's dead and uh i just stunned i mean i really you know you take it personally and it's i don't know i interviewed her once but just it was just like getting cold cocked and david called back later and said there's a uh there's a candlelight vigil at sunken gardens tonight i think six six o'clock i didn't even hesitate i got my car and went down there to see and before i went to sunken gardens i went over to the boutique and it was pretty interesting i'd never been to the boutique before but it was like big and man she wasn't kidding when she was talking it up and it was there and they were like uh someone had left a flower there maybe a rose and a note card and i went to this sunken gardens and it was just you're walking around with all these people in the dark they're holding these candles with a piece of paper so it didn't the wax doesn't drip on on you and they all just have this stunned look they don't know what they're there for they're waiting for someone to tell them what to do i went back after the end of the vigil to the boutique and it was probably closer to 10 o'clock then and i'd seen the veneration happen because all of a sudden the front of the boutique had flowers it was covered balloons all these notes and messages in the course of just a few hours people had felt compelled to go somewhere that was physically tied to selena and and express themselves that was on a friday night i stayed at home saturday and i told i remember telling david so i'm going to let this sit but i'll i'll call mr quintanilla and david call me back later said he's doing a press conference right now so he's already out there i thought well you know i need to go and so sunday morning while the service at san fernando cathedral was playing on the radio live i drove down to san antonio picked up david and we went took a corpus and we stopped first off was at the days inn in corpus christi where she had been shot and where she had been killed and it was the same there were people out on the in the inner uh courtyard of the days in uh with that same stunned look you know they're there they had to be there they don't know why some kid came up to me and said i just hitchhiked from detroit he's kind of out of breath i don't know what i'm doing here but i had to come here and people were going around looking in the grass and i think looking for you know flecks of blood people were following the path from the room where she was shot all the way across the swimming pool into the registration desk the office where she collapsed and died and it just was this kind of sense something happened we're here but we don't know why i was in seventh grade in fort worth texas when john f kennedy got shot john john f kennedy president kenny was in fort worth that morning i can remember the headlines of the paper welcome to fort worth mr president and by lunchtime there's people crying in the cafeteria and uh by an hour later someone's pointing across the street uh that happens to be the house of marina or marguerite oswald the mother of the accused assassin and there's all these fort worth ties lee harvey oswald was a few years ahead of me in high school and that was like this dark day and people it was the bomb went off again they don't know what to do all these people walking around and trying to express themselves with sentiments and i saw this again with selena but it was to me it was within one of the two parallel universes of south texas because you know there's anglo-american texas and there's mexican-american texas and they intermingle sometimes they meet at the mall or uh on the highway or whatever but sometimes they're parallel universes they're very separate and so you know all of a sudden on that drive from san antonio to corpus that sunday morning you saw the cars with the headlights on and you saw the messages written in shoe polish on the windows all referring to selena we love you where we're from we miss you uh uh siempre selena all these all these messages and yet i remember coming back to wimberley and there was a anglo woman who i knew because she had a son about at one of the ages of my sons she was from referrieo an anglo woman from referrio and she said and i said i'd been working on the salinas story and she said i never heard of selena i don't know who she is and i grew up with those people and i thought right then i said you know in my mind this book's for you lady those peop and this book is also for those people these people because no one was writing about this and you know there were newspaper reports and there were some there were some pretty uh uh fantasy-driven books that uh uh masked themselves as serious pieces of work that weren't and yet i felt i felt a responsibility in a way to tell this story about how south texas works how this tejano music business works for all these people that grew up around these people but didn't ever hear of selena but also for the people that didn't have that written history so this gave me an opportunity to write about things that i i knew but hadn't written about before like you know to tell little joe's story and his role in basically creating being the standard bearer of tejano music and working with cesar chavez i'm working on on this book i got to meet johnny herrera who el susputo he was a big crooner who had a hit he was in corpus but he had a hit in mexico which texas acts never made it over in new mexico because tejanos were considered pochos you know country bumpkins they're not real mexicanos they can't even speak the language well so you know we were put down so to meet elsa spiro who had a hit was a star in mexico and then he tells me the story about mentoring abraham came to me and actually making the first recording tape recording on a little recorder of selena and saying she was not very good she learned to do what she did this was not instant talent she she worked hard at man you know that this unfortunate event gave me the chance to write about so many things that i wouldn't have gotten to write about otherwise and to tell these stories that even today it blows my mind how some people just the lack of understanding there is don't you get it this is you know this is our culture texas culture is is we're not we're not the south the south is by ethnic it's african-american anglo-american texas especially south texas is tri-ethnic and you know we're as much mexican-american as anglo-american and african-american even more so and it just i i still can't get over the ignorance of some people about what's in around them what's here don't you have ears can't you hear this music do you not have you never heard of polkita that made you want to kind of get up and bounce you know i i kind of feel sorry for people that have kept been so cloistered that they didn't know who selena was and i felt compelled since her death to really continue to try to tell that story because i think it's a it's an amazing story of a woman that was determined that succeeded against so many odds and was this role model uh when there were no role models and she remains that today in selena's spear i mean was yolanda just off the radar in terms of what she was capable of you know yolanda was kind of an unknown entity when she shows up and she says she wants to be selena's fan club president they didn't have a fan club present things were going they were getting big and this kind of like found offer you know sure why not and you know there wasn't like background checks run or anything and not much known and you know when you hear yolanda's story and she had a past and it was sort of checkered she embezzled a little bit she had really had a hard time working professionally as a nurse and by making this uh you know outreach uh a whole world opened up to yolanda that she had never i mean this woman was small in stature kind of chunky mousy looking kind of person you walk past her you're not going to think twice about who you saw pretty forgettable and all of a sudden through her association with selena as her fan club president she's backstage at these gigs and 5 000 people are yelling and everybody wants a piece of selena and she's the gatekeeper and she became part of the the entourage in a way until selena had put her in charge of the san antonio boutique and that's when things started going awry as far as anyone was aware of no one was aware that she was skimming off the t-shirt sales or fan club memberships but once she got into the boutique that's a business and there's records kept there's accounting done and there's a way to do things and not do things and and i think martin gomez was the first one to something's not right and i think it's when he figured out uh did ran some numbers and you know she uh yolanda took collection up for a ring for selena to give to selena and had made to selena it was the ring selena took off one of her last acts before yolanda shot her but ilana took these contributions in and then she charged it to the american express card so she's already double dipping and martin recalled telling her her telling him about this fantastic thing she wanted to make for celina this jewelry piece that just sounded like bigger larger crazier than anyone imagine and he just thought you know this isn't right and he went to the family to tell them and and i talked he went to suzette who was in charge basically she was uh working with the fan club and doing fulfillment into abraham who was uh salinas father and manager and martin went and said i don't think things are right here and he he kind of thought yolanda was delusional she was talking crazy stuff and started realizing talking to the employees at the boutique and how you know she was really hard to work with wouldn't show she was very secretive kept her cards very close to herself and it was through this that they start doing an accounting of the fan club and she's been stealing from us and abraham and suzette directly confronted yolanda you've been stealing from us and you're going to pay for this now at that point uh i look back and that's kind of a crucial turning point they didn't fire her she was kept around for about three weeks before the murder and it was always work we're going to settle this and the police are going to have their day with you and all this in the meantime she's trying to she's going back and forth to monterey to try to you know finalize his fashion line uh so she's she's doing a lot of things but clearly what i saw in the in the chronology is after being threatened we're going to get you and all that she went to a place to shoot and got a gun and she kept that gun for about a week and she took it back had second thoughts but then less than a week before she did the deed she got the gun again and i'm convinced the first time at least was she thought she was protecting herself against these threats from abraham and selena would never believe what abraham and suzette were saying ilana wouldn't do that she's my best friend and i don't think selena ever believed yolanda did anything wrong until that morning about two hours before she was shot because she had taken she was so concerned yolanda claimed she made up a story about being raped in in monterey and so selena took her to the hospital and the nurse came out and said there was no she was not sexually assaulted and selena was there to get bank records that yolanda had been holding on to and been kind of dodging so that's why she showed up even before she took her to the hospital to check her out for rape she was supposed to get these records and yolanda had delayed those a few times so i think it's just these unfortunate circumstances they didn't get rid of yolanda she had time too much time to think about it and to fantasize and to to perceive threats whether the threat was from abraham or i think that very last time selena removes the ring it's it's a crime of passion if i can't have you if i can't be your best friend if i can't be next to you no one can have you and of course the minute she shot her uh she regretted everything she went to the truck and had the gun to her temple and was crying the whole time she she it was in a fit in a minute not even a minute that that happened and it shouldn't have happened all these little stages you think well what if and what if but it happened and it will always be forever thus she will always make it to a very young age but never be able to mature in the middle age she was telling me about how she was so excited chris and her had bought chris and she had bought property outside of corpus on the other side of south padreal and drive in the country on some acreage and and we're going to raise chickens and raise babies that's what she told me so you know she's frozen in time living at this family compound three houses all behind one chain links fence but knowing where she was going what she was doing what her plans were and just basically how much of an open book she was just kind of like bring it and she was going to she was going to address it and take it on that's what it's frustrating to to just think of a life like that because it is what it is it's frozen she's frozen in time and it's it's a great story to learn in here but it's not the story it should have been so this happens in 95 and then you get invested in the book in 95 finish it in early 96. [Music] and so you wrap that up what did you think would happen once your book was over with her story like you know i don't i don't know what would have happened i mean i had no expectations when i wrote my the book it's just i knew i had a story and it was not just profiling her but when she was shot texas monthly was working on a gun issue all about guns and so i show up on the office on monday afternoon after my second trip to corpus and i said i think i got a story for a gun issue and it was even we you know i never talked about you know every writer wants their story to be on the cover and i'm i went so bold as to say i know this is out of my purview but this really should be a cover story if you see the reaction that i've been seeing well we never have had a hispanic female on the cover i think lena guerrero had been on the cover for embezzling money from this texas lottery i mean when when hispanics had been featured in texas monthly it was usually for doing something bad and here was something good and i got a heated argument well they put her on the cover and it became the best-selling single newsstand issue except for the sesquicentennial special issue and they printed up enough copies for that they sold out of copies and my hope was that you know finally the general media the general market's going to get what's going on here and they're going to start covering it and treating it with respect and all that and i thought you know my book i wanted the book to legitimize a lot of this and it's and i i was i was with little brown a major american publisher and went back and forth with him and it so many times and finally because i wanted a spanish edition never mind that selena grew up anglo grew up speaking english first and having to learn her culture and her language later as a performer but you know i'm just thinking that this is this is a great story and that people should hear it so the article sold so well and again it would have been the best-selling issue had they estimated properly and ordered up enough copies and that just made that made me proud it's like you know this is this is texas two and i just wanted you know so i wanted to carry it out with the book and tell her story and also kind of the history of mexican-american music in texas and i did that and i achieved it but you know i couldn't get little brown to publish in spanish and finally the the final word after going back and forth for three months is well little brown has never published a book in spanish and i can tell you today they have since i mean i i had to do some i don't want to call it trailblazing but being the first to try to tackle a bicultural subject like this and deal with it in in the english language mainstream media was not easy because i had to do more than my share of explaining and i still it still blows my mind how the general market doesn't get it but you know i i got it now and the book's there and i was very pleased about a year after the book comes out uh i get a call and would i appear on the christina show luna vision i mean this is this is this is oprah of latin america sure so i flew to miami and it was a gathering of selena book authors and i remember meeting uh there first before we even did the the taping maria celeste auroras who had a book selena's secret she's a a a personality on uh telemundo and during the salinas trial whenever maria celeste would walk outside the courthouse she's the one that would get all the cheers from the crowd she's a real looker and all this so she wrote a book but it was based on yolanda's secret which was completely bogus elana made this up at the trial at the very by the way i have a secret so is that going to get her any leniency no it didn't so maria celeste is there and a couple other authors and i'm here to say i mean these other books were based on fantasy folklore magic and and things they were not based on fact and at the end of this taping um they bring up a book critic from puerto rico and never many of these people before uh but he says that my book is the one legitimate book that it you know if you want to learn the story the factual story of selena here's this book and it made me really proud because you know i'm i'm having to get dubbed because my spanish is poor enough i need to have someone translate into english for me and and it's very confusing when you're hearing the w and then you're hearing the spanish but i felt proud that i i did that so i went back to tex next day i'm at texas monthly i flew home and at texas monthly no one in the office says anything no one knows univision no one knows selena my i had the same experiences you did as far as talking to my anglo editors at texas monthly this is an important story and you know through fortunate circumstances getting her on the cover for what was already being laid out as a gun issue and here's the gun story here's the best gun story of them all and it was it it set a single issue newsstand sales records for the magazine it was only topped by the sesquicentennial issue and they printed enough copies for that they didn't they underestimated the print run for this and i remember that and to see the people reaction people magazine kind of got it and they were jumping on it but yeah here getting a call from a reporter friend of mine at the express news on friday it wasn't even noon yet she's been shot a subsequent call she's dead and then they're having a vigil and to see the veneration is what got me and that was something that kind of transcended kennedy people did leave roses and expressions but this is this became a hispanic thing so i saw a veneration that night friday night at celina et cetera boutique on broadway i went there before the vigil there were like one or two things left at the door and when i came back the whole front of the building was covered the days in same thing people figured out which hotel room and they're covering it with all these things and it it also on the chain link fence outside the quintanilla family's compound and that one got taken down pretty quick there jehovah's witnesses and this kind of veneration did not fit with you know those the tenants of that faith but you see it happening and it's like you know this is like this is a living thing and where i look at the veneration and what happened then and we look at the passage of time to now the veneration continues and i would argue today certainly as with demographics being what they are uh selena may be bigger than frida calhoun now uh she's not going to knock la vergen off the top of the charts but she's bubbling under and it's that kind of thing because people you know look at her role model good person uh good qualities uh a successful female killed for all the wrong reasons for trusting you know at the hand of your best friend all these circumstances are such that it just it really feeds into something that i saw when i went back to corpus recently and when i've talked to people about selena again everyone will tell their story or you know i heard a records or i got to see her play or or my daughter turn me on to or whatever but when they say the story it always ends with it's so sad and it's one of these i mean this is a it's a great the great latin tragedy they go back to cortez showing up and you think this guy's the savior and instead he wipes out your people but there's a sadness that permeates the culture that i think that her death speaks to and it's not just the music if you try to explain it to people well you know she hadn't done that much music and it was tejano and how do you explain that to people still you can't explain selena with just listening to her music or even just watching her music videos you have to understand the place and time and the context and you know great to have success with bitty bitty bomb bomb i would argue that the more bigger success was singing that coca-cola commercial because no latina had done that yet and here she was she's picked by this the biggest soft drink brand in the world and you're going to be our spokesperson all the other tejano bands were getting beer deals but you know this is separate so you know i just look at the whole package in that uh a female in a real male-dominated business tejano more so than most music and music is generally male dominated certainly the business aspect she was fortunate to have uh a manager who happened to be her father because he looked out for her i remember interviewing laura canales who in the 70s was considered she was kind of like selena the bright female vocalist of tejano music and i met her she was uh she was becoming a speech therapist at texas a kingsville she said i'm trying to teach my people how to say chicken instead of chicken and i just thought that was a beautiful thing but pets laura said i wish i would have had someone like abraham uh looking out for me because i wouldn't have gotten beat up and abused like i did in the business and i wouldn't i might still be in the business today so selena had you know her father looking out after her and he was gonna protect her but to be a young female to grow up in this business and to come of age and to hear her music i mean you hear a recording from 87 or so when she started winning tejano awards and then you know her last recordings were such a creative art she she was always getting better and i was johnny herrera who was uh el suspiro in the 50s he ran a record shop in uh corpus and he mentored both abe and did one of selena's first recordings johnny went out of his way to say this girl was not talented and he wanted to make the point that everything that she was in 1994 1995 was learned and earned and it was hard everything i mean learning spanish how to sing properly i've watched those uh recordings of johnny canales interviewing her and he teases her about her spanish and then selena goes off to monterrey takes lessons and comes back and kind of gives it back to him so you know she's just this it's uh it's a great american story of basically struggling from nothing the family's poor and they become this this beacon this representative of of of a people of a culture and really kind of so many hopes and dreams are resting on her success and she had worked for i think when i interviewed she said 12 years it was a way to put food on the table and she didn't like the music at first and people don't realize that part that she had developed even though she was very young an ongoing relationship with a big part of the crowd a big part of the audience oh that that came from the little girl singing on stage and being a novelty that she attracted people and she stood out there weren't that many young females doing tejana so as she gets better as she becomes a teenager and then as she becomes a young woman we're all growing up with her i mean if you've been watching her that far and you know it's it's you're excited because you know where this is going to go it's not going to just you know go like that it's going to keep going until but then the death stops it everything stopped in time are you surprised that it that it's gone on this way or is you know that there's such a big thing in the 25th the 20th the cumulative floor in corpus or and is that part of the family's cultivation of that and and making sure that legacy stayed i i the family has been very protective about selena's image and rightfully so and very careful i've gotten crosswise with them for writing a book but i respect you know what they have done and what they pulled off over 25 years and the fact that there's the museum in in the recording studio q productions uh i think that's important because people need places to touch uh where she was where and you know you can't find the days in today and the room number has been changed and there's no way there's no evidence at all and you know there's the gazebo you can go there and you go to the cemetery you go to the selena auditorium but there's really not that many places to touch and the studio is it so i i applaud them for for keeping you know being good guardians of the image how about are you surprised that this thing moved from corpus to san antonio or not um you know this that's the other part of it it's hard running a business uh and in the entertainment business even when you're protecting the image of someone who's passed it's still the music business so um when i visited corpus a couple months ago i just got a sense and i hadn't been back i've been in and out a few times but i hadn't been back to look at selena since you know all this went down and i just got the sense corpus did not progress that much and it's and you know i kept thinking you know i always think why is this city that's by you know padre island and you know all this fishing and all this this coastal stuff it's really pretty why doesn't it progress there's there remains a brain drain today the best and brightest sleep and and even even if that brain drain means they just move to san antonio because it's a bigger stage and that's what that the moving of colonel lafleur indicates to me is when one of the biggest corporate citizens of corpus christi citgo declines to be the sponsor of the next como la flor what you guys don't have money to me that's that's like that was a diss so in a way it should have moved somewhere where there's more reception and there's also the sense of bigger stage that i always got the sense talking to selena and just knowing the way things were going and that crossover album that crossover album had she been alive to enjoy it and to promote it uh i think might have taken her out of out of here she might have moved to la i do know she told me about you know when i'm interviewing her she's still living in the family compound on bloomington street in the molina but uh she told me chris and her bought acreage and they were going to raise chickens and babies outside of town they were really looking forward to so and that sounded really sweet and i got to say that when i went to corpus it just looked more like a port town a little beat down the ballpark was nice but you know what a burger field whataburger move they they moved to san antonio so you know you begin to think you know it's just was this too small of a stage and would this have held her for much longer i i'm not sure she was as much of san antonio when she passed as she was of corpus was it part of the story is the what if that that the you know her dreams were talking about acting when i interviewed her she was talking about johnny depp in the movie you know but that's far far down the road i really want to have some goals before that and she look she made it into a telenovela in mexico she she was act i i really believe she was this person by this time in her life and had been working in entertainment long enough show me what you got give me what you got i'll take it and i'll i'll make it happen and she was that person i mean she had that potential she could have been an actress she could have been great uh there's all i try not to play the what ifs but in her case just knowing where she was at making that crossover album and knowing where things were uh it was just it was a matter of a few months and everything would have been crazy and wild and i'm trying to remember we ran into her in la when she was out there was it for the grammys the latin grammys or something i don't even remember what time it was but that that was the next stage and she was looking forward to the english stuff because that's what her ultimate goal was and i don't think people realized that either it was very interesting at that period of time she's going to latin grammys in l.a she's known she's a known entity in la she's selling will and she's also one of the few uh tejano artists or anyone in the west coast to make it in miami and when they when she played kayo ocho and started drawing huge crowds this was transcending the tano envelope and very few acts have been able to do that historically and she was starting to do that so uh it's just you you just when you start thinking about there's a momentum and i'm following it and you just want to follow it through and you don't get to so you can't help but think dang and play a little what if but you also it's tempered with this is what happened and it's a terrible thing but there is a legacy here that's worth uh revisiting and honoring and in my mind this is a person worth venerating a a figure a public figure a symbol an icon whatever you want to call her because she's that now as much as she is a person and it's it's this role model and you know the the hardest thing in playing what if is uh you start thinking well what about the next selena and then it's like no not gonna happen uh forget that don't play that game was it because of the charisma the personality as well because anybody could be i don't say anybody she said i remember in an interview anybody can be a role model but she had a connection i like to think when i'm a reporter and i'm doing an interview even if you know interviewing a music person this is not that hard but i'm gonna be i'm gonna do my business and i melted just in her presence and this was a talent that i kind of started to glean that she could be in a room and there's ten people in here and she's going to know who the record company president is in this room she's going to work them but she's also going to see that little old lady in the corner that no one's talking to and she may work her first that was she was the completest and it's not like yeah i've got business to do no we're people and she was a real people person and just you know you're you you're in that gaze it's like what do you want but i'll give you whatever you want because it really was just uh and seen her without her makeup on before she went on stage i tried to get john dyer who who shot the session for her when she was in the texas 20 to get her without her makeup and he tells the story about the knockdown drag out he had with her and her dad finding it he just finally gave up okay go do what you want and they did and they're really great shots but i'm here to tell you if you if you think this is a beautiful person all made up and dolled up you should have seen her without her makeup on and now speaking of abraham you talk about uh that it was good for her to have him and and all that but still the tension and the control you didn't see chris at the thing yesterday he's not going to be at the tribute he's not going to have his tv series done he was developing one too this there's a lot of misfortune out of this and i wrote about it in the book i made the observation it was not long after she had passed that chris signed over executive rights to abraham and it's since cost chris as far as his ability to to execute some ideas that he wanted to do including a television series he had sketched out it was a that was a contentious relationship uh and it was kind of you know this is what life is like inside the los dinos bubble because you know all through junior high and high school every weekend that they're having a dance in corpus at the high school the junior high or party selena's not there she's working she doesn't know this her life is in this bubble so you know you basically have to operate in this bubble and abraham is a strong forceful presence and that you had to have a manager someone fronting for you like that period it happened to be her father when i was doing the interview on the bus this was for the texas 20. it was outside of a club in downtown austin at one point and abraham sit and and marcela are sitting on the bus bench and celina said something and abraham kind of interjected and she said hush dad i'm talking and you want to play the what if game she's fixing to do an english language crossover the record label was not going to allow the same business infrastructure to continue representing selena that would have changed would she have moved to miami new york l.a probably if she wanted to pursue acting as well there were so many demands on her time towards the end and yet she was addressing every demand and kind of she was stepping up to it and doing it and then there was a fashion line what would have happened there uh and that was gonna be based in monterey she was doing a telenovela in monterrey and there was speculation she was going to move to monterey she really liked monterrey and that was kind of late in the game that she discovered this city that was you know it's like six hours from corpus you drive there and then all of a sudden this is real mexico and it's a huge city and and and you know there's there's a a cultured gentry and she learns how to speak proper spanish among these people uh that was a real eye-opener but so if i was gonna speculate and that's a dangerous game when you're talking about selena she would have moved from corpus and probably from san antonio my guess is she would have gone to a bigger city that could have handled her celebrity as abraham gets older um do you think there'll be less of that i mean i don't know how between suzette maybe and chris but you do you feel for chris because he's out of that lube i do and i don't i mean chris chris has got a pretty good career he's he's married he has kids um and uh you know i know i know through uh my friend adrian casada they've been working on some stuff so like he's got his life and and he's good with it i mean sure there's you know there were some bad things done and uh and i think he got the short end of the stick in many respects but that was that that was then he's moved on and abraham continues to manage his biggest act cue productions has taken on other acts but it's selena that's what what it's about and when i really look at the whole of tejano music so much of it today is more it's it's more norteno from northern mexico and it kind of regressed back to a norteno sound rather than this sophisticated new sound that all these labels thought was going to be the next thing since reggae to sell here i mean they really were all the labels thought were betting heavy on tejano but at the time i mean that was the peak of it with selena it was still you know he had a lot of synthesizers and kind of not as high tech production it would have had to go to that next level to stay and it seemed like after that it didn't well with the tonno and and with selena's band they they didn't start with one but they they would bring in an accordion so there was kind of like a retro movement back to the roots of what tejano was and that was there but i think most dinos were headed you know they were into this was you know this was madonna territory or michael jackson territory with the dance squad uh you know with all the things she had a big production going and i think that was they wanted to take it that direction they wanted to be a pop dance band they didn't want to be necessarily tejano anymore that was their core audience but i don't think that they were burdened by this is holding us back i think this was weird in selena's world because she's flying off to atlanta uh to these to la to do these sessions with you know a record company studio musicians and then she's back at home with her family band and abs kind of bitching that uh we're getting cut out of this this crossover business and we'd like to have a hand in it too so there was some tension there that was might have wound up pulling things apart but it didn't is there still and i'm running into it right now still that anglo-hispanic split where i'm having to explain this is still kind of a big story we need to do something like this do you see that you still have to explain it to people why she's been dead 25 years it was to haunt music when i wrote that book uh that came out in 1996 par part of my goal was was to explain to both sides of what i call our parallel universes of of south texas i wanted to write a history for mexican americans about their music and about this artist and i also wanted to explain be a splainer to all all those that referred to mexican americans and south texas as those people and uh i found that the gap is is not as broad as as it has been and there's more comfort in many ways with just you know our our bi-culture uh our bi cultural bilingual uh uh being that we are this is this is who we are as a people and but i'm still we're still dealing with immigration issues so i don't know uh in some ways it's gotten it's kind of recently gotten worse but i really like to think that one of the great things selena did was leaven those differences and you know make us all realize we're all we're all texans or if we're all speaking spanish we're all tejanos i'm a tejano even though i might not look like a taiwanese but if you if you if you absorb the culture and you and you you embrace it yeah it's part of who you are and we're coming along more and there have been some pretty interesting artists since and i keep paying attention keep waiting for that next but uh there's been nothing like the phenomenon we witnessed when selena los dinos were riding high tejano music was the thing and uh the possibilities were unlimited it seems like just a couple asking questions as i remember when before i got there uh in the 80s heavy metal yeah and then that kind of waned and there was a tejano that filled the vacuum but as she said it was it was for people like her that didn't speak spanish and they were kind of getting back to their roots and so it's bringing in more people that way whether they consider themselves hispanic or not they weren't taught at school they may have spoken spoken spanish in the home but some of them are second third fourth generations and so they were kind of getting back into that and that's what it was growing up anyway it wasn't like i don't want to say mexican american first generations people from mexico this was american kids american kids yeah no it you know i think of it kind of like an accordion bellows it expands and contracts and you know you come back to the 1940s and early 50s there was like uh beto via and they cedro lopez and they're doing big band music that's popular like glenn miller and all that but they're singing in spanish and what little joe did he started doing r b and sunny sunny ozuna sunny in the sunliners did a lot of r b singing in english and both those acts they kind of hit his english anger english language acts first and then after about five years they do like los dinos they start singing everything in spanish and where where where we are addressing our specific audience never mind the rest we're not going for the general market anymore so it's always been these efforts to kind of expand and then it contracts and what was happening in the late 80s and early 90s is tejano was on this expansion where there was really in the business of music people were thinking is this the next sound is you know just like a reggae coming out of jamaica regionally specific but it becomes a pop sound and it didn't it stopped emilio was trying to do it as a nashville act uh la mafia were trying to be international and very sophisticated group omaz was doing more of the traditional almost norteno stuff but all that stopped with selena's death no one went forward no one succeeded the air went out of tejano music and even though today i mean entocable will sell millions of copies and are hugely popular and they're part of that tejano lineage uh they're almost like more of a reversion to norteno they're not a direct descendants of selena e los dinos do you think if she would have lived again what if that she would have kept the hano going even though she was crossing over that tejano would have gone to the next level had selena lived speculation again i believe tejano would have gone over in a big way continued to go over while selena as the artist would cater to the two parallel universes she's going to do an english language album and do her pop stuff but she was never going to abandon what she had developed and especially when you think that she could have abandoned anything uh uh to do with mexican culture or spanish language easily at the time that she was doing the crossover but instead she's she's on a telenovela she's on tv in mexico so it's like what do you want what's better oh they're all great i think tahana would have also gone not just because she was keeping it alive but maybe gone more sophisticated with the influence of some of those producers that it wouldn't have stayed just the regional sound you know i think ahead she lived maybe those producers that were working with her in the english language album would have sussed this out and and wanted to come and play with this field i can make some differences here and that's been forever thus with tejano music it's always been these kind of you know unknown producers that don't get recognized but they came in bob griever was a great example of like you know he was an anglo but he tapped into it early and he had he had big hits he had he had a blown and going label or uh you know but they didn't get recognized had a name producer started showing up on this scene to produce maz or emilia that would have gotten a lot of attention and it's what's it gonna turn out to be uh i think of the uh the ranchera that selena sings in that johnny depp uh movie you know she's a great i never heard her sing like lucha via but she does there and she's a great voice and i think maybe she would have tried that style she would have experimented with more different kinds of music but you know at the end of the day she would still be selena so you can't rub the titano off i compartmentalize a lot of things and that's one of those deals where i put it aside i wrote an article that's appearing in the march issue of cowboys and indians magazine it was kind of my reminiscence and it was like trying to relive a little bit of what happened but also where it is now and capture it and see what it is and it's just uh when you get back into it then it's like it is it's sad it's a sad story and you can't you can't help it get swept up in that and just like you know i'm not here for you know to play on the emotions but it's just like god i forgot all about that and then you start reliving it so i've had visits uh i've talked with martin gomez who's trying to write a book um and uh stephanie bagara i love speaking with her because she has a cover band called bitty bitty bonda she's from austin grew up stoned tejano and and was working in in the city of austin music business division when she and her friends got together to do this thing and it won't stop it was just like a goof at a club and they've traveled all over the united states uh overseas and it's this thing now and it was interesting for her to tell me that at first she doesn't look like selena and there are many selena tribute bands out there that women that do look like selena stephanie does not and at some point about a year into doing bitty bitty banda and people going nuts over this and wanting to hear these songs she decided i'm going to be me now so no bustier none of the gear and she plays it straight but she said uh one of the first times she did this a woman she's playing in san antonio an older woman came up and she said i know this must be hard for you to do this and people saying there'll never be another selena you've got her spirit and so you know those little stories um i don't know they left me feeling like she's still out there she's bigger than ever and i like to think she's gonna you know as time passes uh and uh she'll knock frida off the charts is as an icon worthy of veneration uh and you know you see it you see it in in in gay clubs when the drag queens come out there's always a selena now uh you see in so many different aspects of life that you just don't think it's when stripes sells the commemorative cups or heb does t-shirts and they sell out you know that tells me this is stronger than ever and it's going to continue because that story even though i can play what if and think god it was it was would have been that much more the story that we have is an incredible story it's it's one that you can't make up and it remains this forever and now some people are going to look at that and go well you know it's just commercialization i've heard i actually uh on our facebook page when we put something less just let her die something like that you know just let it go she's dead which is crass or it seems crass but on the other side people might see it as commercialism that they're taking advantage of um look that the the charge of commercialism has been constant and that will come when your father is your manager it's just business and business and art uh mixed together a lot and you can't be pure one way or the other so um i can see people say oh it's commercial you could say the film selena was commercialism and i remember i got into a debate with abraham quintanilla on a radio station in corpus and it was pretty heated he said you're you're trying to live off my daughter you're trying to make money off my daughter i said abraham you're making money i mean abraham you're making a movie for warner brothers i'm doing this book for little brown which is a time warner company we're both working for the same people and i think we have the same thing in mind i want people to know who this woman was you know if i can get paid for it great but i'm not going out on the road and going to be doing shows i'm a writer i'm writing a book i know books well enough i'm getting rich off this this is more work than it's worth but i want people to know this story because it's just you know i'm i'm so lucky as a writer to have been in this place in this period of time and to be able to tell this story and unfortunately there were not others in my position to do the same so i felt a responsibility how about now do you i mean you wrote for cowboys and indians yeah do you ever think of expanding or updating the book or writing another book last year i took the time out and spent time and money and read my book as an audio book and i still would like to get it translated into spanish i own the rights to it little brown gave me the rights back i was such a uncomfortable person to be with about they didn't publish in spanish they just said they gave him the book back so i i own it and i've been able to do a kindle and i did a an audio book and i thought about you know do you update you expand and after reading the book no i mean everything i said pretty much came to pass or i don't think i did too much predicting i would have written it differently but i don't know that i've got that you know much more to say about it other than this 25 years has passed and uh her uh her image or the awareness of selena is greater than ever uh she's more distant than ever to have seen the grave site shortly after her burial and to go see it today is different it's been it's matured there's a little gate around her gravesite so people can't get in into it and deface it um there's a lot of graffiti on the bricks in her selena memorial gazebo but you know what these are just people want to say i touched this i was here and as i don't think it's something that's unique to the hispanic culture in texas to want to have that connection that connectivity but i do feel like it's it's exhibited in an overt strong fashion it's people don't hide about that and people are still sending messages to selena and they're still letting her know how she's inspired them or their children or someone in their family and uh it's just you know whether you know you don't have to say i like i don't even like her music or whatever that doesn't even matter it's who's this figure selena and uh she's with us and it's important to recognize her no matter how well you knew her and i'm here to tell you after writing about her and looking into her life and her story she's going to be with you for the rest of your life

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Length: 68min 5sec (4085 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021