Remembering Selena 30 years later
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Happy Colorado Sunday, friends.
I wasn’t the kid who had fan posters hanging in her bedroom or on her school locker door, though I will allow that I did have a copycat version of a haircut made famous by an Olympic figure skater who hardly anyone thinks about today. So I kind of get this week’s cover story about the Tejano icon Selena. But what is so intriguing about Parker Yamasaki’s reporting is the examination of how and why Selena’s draw is still so powerful, 30 years after she was murdered. There is something about Selena that set her as a cultural touchstone, and we’re here to celebrate it.
Editor
The Cover Story
What can I say about Selena?
Here’s the thing about Selena Quintanilla. There’s a chance that you’ve never heard of the late, great Tejano singer. There’s an almost equal chance that she means everything to you.
Those of you in the latter group can skip to the next paragraph. For those of you in the former, here’s a quick recap. Selena Quintanilla was born in southern Texas and raised in a family of musicians. She started performing with her older siblings at weddings, street festivals, quinceñeras and local restaurants. Her strong, sentimental vocals garnered a ton of attention — at 10 she had a record contract, at 13 her first album was released. It was all sparkles and stardust from there —sold-out stadiums, world tours, Grammy awards —until it wasn’t.
On March 31, 1995, just before her first English-language album was to be released, Selena was shot and killed by the president of her own fan club.
Other rock stars have died young and famous. But Selena’s fans, now a multigenerational cohort, keep her spirit alive in ways unlike those other stars.
There’s a Selena movie, a Netflix series, a podcast; hundreds of articles written, thousands of TikToks posted. She’s a popular “theme” for club nights and art shows and Halloween costumes. Which created a certain challenge for me, as a journalist, going into this story.
What can be said about Selena that hasn’t already been said?
March 31 marked 30 years since Selena’s murder. A number of Selena-themed commemorations popped up around the Front Range as a result. I attended a couple in Lakewood, hosted by the Chicano Humanities and Arts Council.
Most of the material for this story came from those events, because at this point, the story isn’t about Selena. It’s about her fans, and the daughters of her fans, and the daughters of the daughters of her fans, and how each of them have incorporated Selena into their own lives.
Some of them have used the singer’s Mexican American identity to launch cultural research projects, others just like to dance to her songs in their kitchens. Whatever your relationship with the singer is, we’re glad you’re here. Throw on “Como La Flor,” and let’s get into it.
READ THIS WEEK’S COLORADO SUNDAY FEATURE
Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
The Colorado Lens
Right on cue, pasque flowers began blossoming, seemingly overnight, in the hills around Crested Butte South. Photojournalist Dean Krakel chased the bloom along Lower Cement Creek last week, right into a snowstorm Friday.
Dana Coffield | Editor
Flavor of the Week
An artist’s life story in 18 works
Let me admit that fiber and fiber arts fascinate me. As does “Confluence of Nature: Nancy Hemenway Barton,” on display through Oct. 19 at the Denver Art Museum.
The exhibit on the sixth floor of the Martin Building is relatively small, but many of the 18 works are mighty, including “Thaw,” an undulating hanging made of Swaziland cotton embroidered with mohair that takes up the middle of the room. The works reflect Hemenway’s appreciation for nature in a medium she called “bayetage” — a combination of flower-dyed wool, coarse fabric napped to look like felt, known as bayeta, and collage — that she first began to practice while living in Bolivia in the late 1960s. It was among several countries she lived in with her husband, a diplomat.
When they returned to the United States in the 1970s, she devoted herself to her art, still ordering many of her fibers from international sources. Hemenway died in 2008 at age 87, but her works live on, many of them in a permanent collection at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, her alma mater.
She worked in studios in the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Mexico and Washington, D.C., but her heart was on the coast of Maine. Take a few moments to sit and reflect on the 5-minute film of the Maine coast with natural sounds broadcast throughout the gallery.
Many of the works are in natural hues, but later works often feature brighter colors and more complicated sculptural elements. Docent-led tours of the exhibit are at 1:30 p.m. on Mondays and Fridays.
Sandra Fish | Data Journalist
SunLit: Sneak Peek
From “Save Me, Stranger,” a cancer patient takes on an odd mission
EXCERPT: In this excerpt from the short story “Eat My Moose” within Erika Krouse’s new collection, “Save Me, Stranger,” one particular stranger “saves” terminal patients by helping them die — an exercise that inexplicably reverses symptoms of his own terminal cancer. The themes of strangers and rescue find various forms throughout her pieces, and the story of the character Colum, an Army veteran and “professional euthanizer” who offers his service to clients in the Alaskan wilderness, provides a fascinating take.
THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: Krouse explains how a friend’s suicide, and the subsequent guilt and remorse, shaped the title story as well as the collection’s theme. She also indicated that the experience of crafting a short story collection makes her want to return to the form. Here’s a slice of her Q&A:
SunLit: What did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter?
Krouse: Writing “Save Me, Stranger” reminded me how diverse short stories can be. The short story is by nature an experimental form because they don’t have to carry the same page-turning structural weight as a novel or memoir. They can fly! Writing “Save Me, Stranger” gave me even more respect for the genre, and a desire to explore it more.
READ THE INTERVIEW WITH ERIKA KROUSE
Kevin Simpson | Writer
Sunday Reading List
A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.
???? People helping others are nothing if not adaptable. Jennifer Brown caught up with the Village Exchange Center in Aurora, where more people than ever are being served, but how they are getting help has changed as fear of deportation settles into the community.
???? More hats got thrown into the ring last week. There was Yadira Caraveo in the 8th Congressional District, Greg Lopez for governor and state Sen. Jeff Bridges for treasurer. We told you last week about U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s plans to run for governor, which Jesse Paul learned has some interesting implications for who might be named to replace him in Washington if he wins and how that might happen.
????Was U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper damning his colleague Michael Bennet with faint praise when he told Jason Blevins that the bar to being a good governor is set very low? Hick had other more important things on his mind during a tour of Western Slope towns surrounded by public lands, too.
????Here we are, on the 26th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, with columnist Mike Littwin contemplating another mass shooting that we can barely pay attention to, this time at Florida State University.
???? Executive orders extolling the virtues of “beautiful, clean coal” notwithstanding, Tri-State Generation and Transmission says coal-fired Craig Station will shut down as planned. Mark Jaffe reported an interesting tidbit along the way: More electricity is generated in the U.S. using nuclear technology than is generated by coal.
???? Rules around tipped minimum wages changed — sort of — in state law last week. Tamara Chuang learned that most of the responsibility has been kicked back to cities where minimum wage exceeds the state hourly minimum.
???? Nederland is starting to feel like the little town that could. Powdr Corp. has pulled Mt. Bachelor in Oregon off the market, but Eldora is still for sale and Jason Blevins reports the Boulder County mountain town is gathering financing to do a deal for the ski hill.
???? There’s a lot of maneuvering around environmental regulations right now. Michael Booth and Parker Yamasaki picked up on a lawsuit filed in Mesa County challenging Colorado’s methane emissions rules that didn’t get much oxygen until the Trump administration directed the U.S. Department of Justice to fight these types of state laws.
???? The Endangered Species Act is in the crosshairs, too, with an attempt to redefine “harm.” Michael Booth teased out the details.
Dana Coffield | Editor
Thanks for hanging out with us today. Have you gotten your Colorado SunFest 2025 tickets yet? The whole symposium May 16 at the University of Denver is shaping up to be extra interesting.
I’m most excited to be in the room with Mark McKinnon, the co-creator of “The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth.” I’m confessing now: I watched the entire last season of that show in one weekend and came away from the experience thinking that if McKinnon just pops in from his home in the high country, yells “WE TOLD YOU SO” into the mic and leaves, he’d be totally justified.
But he’s got a lot more than 2023 on the unofficial GOP presidential campaign trail to talk about, including his work with the No Labels political movement (he’s been a D and he’s been an R), the perplexing nature of Gen Z voters, and an interesting discovery about his Civil War-era ancestors that has informed his thinking about race and identity in America today. Please come and listen with me!
— Dana
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