Selena Forever: A Conversation with Deborah Paredez
Selena The Series (L to R) Carlos Alfredo Jr. as Joe Ojeda, Hunter Reese Peña as Ricky Vela, Noemi Gonzalez as Suzette Quintanilla, Christian Serratos as Selena Quintanilla, Gabriel Chavarría as A.B. Quintanilla, Jesse Posey as Chris Perez in trailer of Selena The Series. Credit: Michael Lavine/Netflix © 2020
On Dec. 4th I, like so many others, will be staying up past midnight to binge-watch Selena: The Series. But like any diehard Selena fan, I’ll be watching closely to see how the new Netflix series answers many of the lingering questions around how the beloved Tejana star will be portrayed. Will Selena be cemented as the model Mexican daughter icon? Or is she the diva, queen of Tejano who was unapologetically sexy? What does this revival mean for the legacy of Gregory Nava’s 1997 biopic film? Is Netflix trying to cash in on the Latinx consumer market? Scholar and poet, Deborah Paredez, author of Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke 2009), gives Intervenxions a closer look at these questions about the upcoming Netflix original series. The following is our conversation that took place via zoom on Thursday November 12, 2020.
Yollotl Lopez (YL): What was your reaction when you heard that they were making a Netflix series?
Deborah Paredez (DP): There's a part of me that still feels so surprised that Selena is still resonating. Then there's a part of me that's not surprised at all, given the continued virulence that Latinos face in so many ways in mainstream culture. That virulence has always been, since Selena's death, accompanied by an apparent honoring of one of “us.” I think that's always been an interesting tension. So I'm really curious to see if the Netflix series will follow the same somewhat overdetermined narrative that we have seen about Selena in the film—the “good daughter who's like fulfilling her father's dream”—a very kind of Oedipal story. I'm curious how much of this particular narrative is going to stay intact, or how much they might venture beyond it. I think the way to venture beyond it is to pay attention to the fandom, which is always the story about Selena that I find is the most compelling.
Selena The Series, Christian Serratos as Selena Quintanilla in episode 101. Credit: Sara Khalid/Netflix © 2020
YL: You mentioned [in your book] Selenidad, “Selena's public persona, career and rumors, life involves negotiations between convention and transgression.” You mentioned the fandom pointed out the things that happened in the aftermath of [her death] like her boutique, up and running, would have taken so little money to keep going. And yet, that wasn't part of the investment of the legacy. Everything that was her own independent life and her own ventures wasn't part of that upkeep afterwards. Is this part of the fascination with her? The fact that we have this ongoing narrative, and yet people keep trying to bring up all of these other factors about her—this trope of “the good Latina daughter.”
DP: What is appealing for fans of Selena is not so much the good daughter narrative. Her father very closely tried to manage her career. Selena ventured beyond that as much as she could during her short life, but I think that what is appealing to most fans isn't just that she was a good daughter, [but] actually the ways that she did try to push against that. The boutique represented, for so many fans and I think perhaps for Selena herself, an assertion of financial independence and assertion of creative control over her own bodily image and persona through fashion and design. It was wholly hers. That wasn't within the domain of knowledge that the family might have had, because it was beyond the recording industry. Of course, it makes sense that those things fall by the wayside.
The fandom that persists is invested in the official stories and it's not the story alone that ends up being the thing that draws them. It's all of the other scripts that circulate that are never going to be acknowledged. We hold on to that, to keep asserting Selena as a queer icon, who was unapologetically sexy, who designed clothes and tried to assert a financial independence from a family that was perceived to benefit from her financial success. I think that narrative being in place just makes it all the more of an incentive for fans to emphasize the other scripts, or make their own.
YL: In your book you mentioned the example of the People Magazine issue on Selena’s death which sold more copies than [the publication ever imagined.] You mentioned, “Is it that they finally understood the Latino purchasing power?” Do you think this, in part, drives this constant resurrection of her image and her life? Or is it that there's so few Latina role models in [the] music industry?
DP: So the answer is yes, and yes. Even as I'm surprised sometimes by Selena’s continued, and even stronger place in popular culture, I'm also not entirely surprised, because there hasn't been a replacement. The reason for that isn't because there are [no] extraordinarily talented and amazing young brown women out there creating incredible art. It is because this field of representation is so extraordinarily narrow for Latino communities. Especially for brown women. So because there hasn't been the space wide enough to allow for that for a range. There hasn't been someone who could replace her.
Selena: The Series. Courtesy of Netflix.
There's that ongoing sense of popularity and, as we're seeing with the election, every so often hegemonic culture or mainstream culture suddenly decides, “Oh, right, we know about Latinos.” And there's this renewed, both discovery and seeming interest, although gross misunderstanding and gross generalizations about Latinos, precisely because it's only interesting in larger culture as a voting block, or as a market. There is this way by which this drive to make Latinos into either a body politic, or into a consumer market, continues. I think capitalism sort of draws from like, “Oh, right, okay, if I just pull up the icon, then I can summon that market.” The People Magazine story is so fascinating, because they thought, “Oh, okay, we'll just run this cover in parts of the country that seemed to have a lot of brown folk and maybe they'll buy it.” And then, when they saw that we kept buying and buying and buying, they sort of stumbled on what they didn't even realize was a market.
YL: I certainly owned all of those magazines. [. . .] There was the Barbie. And there were the tribute concerts, the film, the makeup collections. The line for MAC was around the block!
DP: Absolutely. I remember doing some interviews around the time when the MAC line was released. Many folks were asking, “What do you think about this commodification of Selena? You know, fashion and everything?” I said, “Yes, absolutely. That's true. Sure, certainly, MAC is capitalizing in all these ways on her.” But that doesn't interest me as much as these women in line. Like, what are they doing with this makeup? Who do they imagine themselves to be if they wear this makeup? That's always been more interesting to me. Like, who can we be as brown women because of our engagement with Selena?
Selena The Series, Christian Serratos as Selena Quintanilla in episode 101. Credit: Netflix © 2020
YL: In your book, you mentioned “the appropriate modes of memorializing Selena” [becomes a] struggle about “racialized and class codes of behavior for claiming and performing civic citizenship.” The debate since the film with JLo [up] to Christian Serratos playing Selena [became], “Is this the right person to play her? Are there not more talented, yet unknown actors, out in the world who could pull this off? Is the dancing too sharp? Is she being too whitewashed? Is Christian Serratos too light-skinned to be playing Selena?” What do you think about all this constant policing?
DP: [It] happened, obviously, with the film, and certainly continues. Obviously, representation matters in so many ways for us to feel a sense of our presence in the world being acknowledged and affirmed. [...] If we look at it from the kind of philosophy of someone like Anna Deavere Smith, she talks about “acting is the travel from the self to the other,” there's this idea that there has to be an equal match. Like, the only person that can play Selena is one who is Mexican American and Tejana, and exactly the shade of brown; as if those particular kinds of experiences somehow authenticate one. That isn't the case. There isn't a kind true experience of Tejanoness, or much less Latinoness. There's something troubling to me about adhering to that particular kind of authenticity politics. At the same time, I do think that it matters that, given the very limited opportunities for brown actresses (the browner, the more limitations) that it is an important political and aesthetic act to cast someone we're not going to very frequently see. We know by now, which is what J Lo's career has taught us, is that to perform Selena is to become a star. That can be a pathway to launching a career. So the idea of someone who's at the very beginning of her career, or unknown, is exciting to me to think about. What could that offer and provide for that particular actress from that kind of perspective?
I think that there's also something really exciting if we think about theories of casting. Every actor is haunted by the previous roles. There's something about [Christian Serratos] as Selena. She's already haunted forever by that particular role of the warrior occupying the realm of the dead. [It] will be really interesting to see how that particular haunting, so to speak, will then inform the ways we receive her approach to Selena.
Selena The Series, Christian Serratos as Selena Quintanilla. Credit: Victor Ceballos Olea/Netflix © 2020
YL: You mentioned in your book the rasquachismo of Selena’s style and how it was a direct reflection of her working class background. She was a self taught designer. The [band] doing all of their own hair and makeup for all of those early years. They hadn't quite reached that point where they could have a makeup artist and a hairstylist, fashion stylist, and an on-call seamstress all on tour with them. So, they're doing everything themselves. And yet, there's already this pushback [to the series] of like, “Wow, how tacky are these wigs? Wow, how awful are these costumes?” [But] if you look at Selena from 13, 14, 15 years old, I'm sorry, but this was her “ugly haircut’ phase. She hadn't quite found her style. I'm glad that they're actually showing this in the series.
DP: What I do find interesting about that very story is that unpolishedness of Selena’s self presentation, whether it's in those early years, or even some of the later costumes, that seemed very decidedly pronounced in their Tejano working class way. Precisely that kind of unpolishedness is part of what continues to draw people to her. In an age where everything is hyper produced, super polished, [with Selena] there was something very refreshing. That unpolishedness, that bad perm that many of us had in the 80s provides us a point of connection for people yearning for a feeling of the authentic. [...] That invites us in. She ushered in this “diva pop” as brand. During her life, there wasn't a kind of formula in the same way that there has been in the years since. Beyonce has talked about being so influenced by Selena, and I think used her whole kind of persona as a model by which then you build the beehive, so to speak. Beyonce is not alone in that.
YL: Growing up in the States, especially in the southwest, [as second generation or third generation], we identify with [Selena’s] Cristina interview where she says “diez y cuatro” and Cristina corrects her saying “catorce.” We’ve all made those mistakes trying to learn Spanish and to speak with some sort of dignity—the language that's not our first. So, I'm really excited to see how they do that in the series.
DP: I am really hopeful that that particular struggle with Spanish really does get its airtime, because Selena and I were the same generation, both grew up in South Texas, having had families living there for many generations. [...] Mexicano communities have been speaking Spanish when it's colonized by the United States after being colonized by Spain. Selena’s grandparents and my grandparents and many others were forced to speak English in schools or they [would] be castigated. So then you had generations after, like me and Selena, whose grandparents and parents were sort of forced over time to speak more English, so you lose Spanish. But you're not always given the educational opportunities to speak an English that might get you a white collar job. Gloria Anzaldua talks about that kind of linguistic terrorism that's happened that's part of the colonial project. [Selena’s] public struggle with Spanish became such a point of identification for many young Latinos, especially in the southwest, who perhaps may have wanted to speak Spanish better. We're reckoning with those sort of generations of linguistic terrorism. So her performance of that “diez y cuatro,” or the performance in the Monterey news conference, where she says “estoy muy excited!” Those moments where she's just out there with the struggle become deeply important as a point of identification for so many of us. That she could be just reckoning and sort of moving past the shame we feel about that. [...] D. Inés Casilla, and other scholars, have talked about the way that Latinos get absolutely overdetermined as Spanish speakers. That's strategic, because then it keeps us outside of the borders of what counts as American. We get sort of screwed both ways, because then we're both absolutely over determined and reduced to Spanish language speakers, and castigated for not speaking Spanish well enough. That works as a shaming device to sort of destabilize us from both the kind of U.S. body politic, but also within a kind of Latino community formation as well. Politics are always going to then serve to make us feel like we're not enough.
YL: What is one thing that you would like, not just for our readers, but for anybody who is going to be staying up till midnight just to binge watch the series, what would you like people to keep in mind?
DP: I really want people to keep in mind how important Selena has been historically to queer brown communities. I don't have tremendous faith that will be a big part of this story, as it often is not. Not just because of the ways that drag queens by perform her, but also because of the ways as I talked about in my book that she becomes a site for Latina lesbian desire. Her narrative about not listening to the father, and going to that illicit hotel room is a narrative that itself is a kind of queering narrative. Her early death resonates for folks precisely because we're a community, (black communities as well) that is, unfortunately, deeply familiar with what it means to lose someone young, through violence. Those kinds of things continue to be deeply resonant. [She] continues to be a kind of mobilizing force within sanctuary conversations for young folks who are interested in thinking about possibility that is cut short by political policies, whether it's about pro-immigration to immigration policies that are threatening to take rights away from young, not just dreamers, but immigrants in general.
Finally, I would want people to remember how extraordinarily talented and savvy she was as a musician, and as a kind of a person who was invested in trying to own as much as she could the means of production. There was something [in] that attempt to be in control of as much of her career as she could at her young age. I think that is really inspiring.
Yollotl Lopez is a new member to the Intervenxions team, joining in September 2020. She is a doctoral candidate at NYU English Department, finishing her dissertation “Dream On: Undocumented Youth Immigrant Narratives and the Rhetoric of Immigration.” She is also an educator, editor, and creative writer in the New York area. Native of the Mojave Desert of California, she is the proud daughter of Mexican immigrants.
Deborah Paredez is a poet and interdisciplinary performance scholar whose lectures and publications examine Black and Latinx popular culture, poetry of war and witness, feminist elegy, cultural memory, and the role of divas in American culture. She is the author of the award-winning critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke 2009) and of the poetry collections, This Side of Skin (Wings Press 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA 2020). Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, National Public Radio, Boston Review, Poetry, Feminist Studies, and elsewhere. Her research and writing have been supported by the Hedgebrook Center for Women Writers, the American Association of University Women, and the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation. She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Theatre and Performance at Northwestern University and her BA in English at Trinity University. Born and raised in San Antonio, she has lived on both coasts, endured a handful of Chicago winters, and taught American poetry in Paris, while remaining rooted in her Tejana love of Selena and the Spurs. She currently lives with her husband, historian Frank Guridy, and their daughter in New York City where she is a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University and the co-Founder of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latinx poets.