The queen of Tex-Mex and the murderer: Selena’s legend lives on 30 years after her death
The denial of parole for Yolanda Saldívar, the woman who killed the Latin music star, revives the circumstances of the crime and the immeasurable legacy of a life cut short at age 23
The Selena Quintanilla-Pérez museum in Corpus Christi, a majority-Hispanic city in southern Texas facing the Gulf of Mexico, contains almost the entire universe of the Queen of Tex-Mex Music: hundreds of portraits of the singer, her red Porsche, her collection of Fabergé eggs, her awards and gold and platinum records, around 20 of the outfits she designed herself, and the stream of fans who pass by in groups every few minutes. There is no trace of the woman who shot her in the back, Yolanda Saldívar. And a subtle ellipsis —in the letters of condolence from, among others, then-president Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, then governor of Texas — acknowledges the death on March 31, 1995, of a 23-year-old artist who had already made history in the Latin pop industry and in the Mexican-American community in the United States.
