Selena Born: The Queen of Tejano Music

Selena was performing with her family's band by age nine, singing in Spanish she was still learning because her father Abraham had recognized that the Tejano music market needed a female star. Born Selena Quintanilla-Perez on April 16, 1971, in Lake Jackson, Texas, she grew up in a bilingual household but spoke English as her first language. Her father taught her to sing phonetically in Spanish, and she learned the language fully only as her career progressed. Selena y Los Dinos, featuring her brother A.B. on guitar and her sister Suzette on drums, played anywhere that would have them: weddings, quinceañeras, state fairs, and small-town dancehalls across Texas. By her late teens she was the biggest star in Tejano music, a genre that blended Mexican folk traditions with polka, country, and pop influences. She won the Tejano Music Award for Female Vocalist nine consecutive years beginning in 1987. Her 1994 album Amor Prohibido went multiplatinum and produced four number-one singles on the Billboard Latin chart. She designed her own stage costumes, launched a clothing line with boutiques in Corpus Christi and San Antonio, and was in the middle of recording her first English-language crossover album, Dreaming of You, when she was shot and killed on March 31, 1995, by Yolanda Saldivar, the founder of her fan club, at a Days Inn motel in Corpus Christi. She was twenty-three. Saldivar was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Dreaming of You debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, making Selena the first Latin artist to achieve the feat. Her influence on the subsequent generation of Latin crossover artists, from Jennifer Lopez to Shakira, was acknowledged explicitly.