Latino Legacy Level Of Interest Following Selena’s Death Spurs Publishers, Filmmakers To Look At Hispanic Market

The queen of Tejano music shot to death in a motel room by the woman who not only was the president of her fan club, but also her most faithful friend.

It was a riveting tale of novela proportions.

When news spread of Selena Quintanilla Perez’s death in March 1995, thousands were consumed by the sorrow of knowing that the young, beautiful singer had been silenced just as she was beginning to skyrocket. Thousands more asked a collective Selena who?

In life, she had been a popular Tejano singer who reached out beyond her Tex-Mex community, luring fans from the wide spectrum of Spanish-speaking America.

In death, she became a cultural - and marketing - phenomenon.

Selenamania gripped America as fans scrambled to buy any scrap that bore her name - T-shirts, buttons, magazines, books. People magazine and TV Guide saw sales of their special issues on Selena go through the roof.

“Dreaming of You,” the album released just a few months after her death, which included her first English recordings, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts. It sold more than 300,000 copies in one week, a record surpassed by only one other female singer - Janet Jackson. The album went triple platinum.

Selena’s greatest legacy may not have been her soulful music but her role in forcing mainstream America to wake up to the Hispanic community surging around it - a community 28 million strong and with an estimated purchasing power of $300 billion.

The spending frenzy unfurled in the whirl of rumors that surrounded Selena’s death.

Was she having an affair with the woman who created her fan club? Or was Yolanda Saldivar, the matronly confidante 12 years her senior, suffering a disturbed, unrequited love? Had Selena been abused by her father?

Was she trying, even at 23 and married, to run away from home and from his controlling grasp, perhaps into the arms of a 50ish plastic surgeon she met in Mexico?

Even as the second anniversary of her death approaches, even as yet another book about the tragedy rolls off the press (by Miami TV anchor Maria Celeste Arrars) and a major motion picture about her life is about to be released, there are more questions than answers.

Only one thing is certain: She was a superstar about to happen.

“She would have been the next Rita Moreno, but much bigger,” said Telemundo entertainment reporter Mauricio Zelig, who interviewed Selena three weeks before her death. “She would have been a true crossover.”.

Selena embodied the easy duality of young Hispanic Americans who are not only bilingual but bicultural, who can shift from rancheras to grunge rock without missing a beat, who can be just as passionate for the countries their parents left behind as they are for the one where they are coming of age.

“She was a torch bearer for a new generation of Latinos,” said Gregory Nava, director and writer of “Selena,” the movie, to be released nationally March 21 by Warner Bros. “She was entering the mainstream not trying to be somebody she wasn’t.

“She wasn’t Rita Cancino changing her name to Rita Hayworth. She was Mexican American and proud of it.”

And the Hispanic community responded to Selena in a big way. Nothing proved the community’s power better than People magazine, long a barometer of popular American culture.

Two weeks after Selena’s death, in response to a barrage of calls from fans thirsting for information, People yanked the cast of Friends from its cover and replaced it with Selena in 11 states surrounding her Texas birthplace. It sold out overnight.

“Our switchboard literally broke down,” said People spokeswoman Susan Ollinick.

A week later, wide-eyed, People released a special tribute issue dedicated wholly to Selena. It was only the third tribute in its history.

The other two honored Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Audrey Hepburn. Selena’s sold out of its 600,000-copy first printing in days.

“We went back to the press, which we have never done before, and we printed 350,000 additional copies,” Ollinick said. “It was a real touchstone for us. We hadn’t realized the depth or the passion the Hispanic community had for popular culture.”

People quickly got the picture. Selena’s death led to the creation in November of People en Espanol, an entire magazine dedicated to Hispanic Americans.

TV Guide recently got it, too. It went with Selena on the cover of its Dec. 7 issue in Texas and surrounding regions. Sales of the weekly in that area leaped 28 percent.

The Selena piece, about the E! Entertainment Television movie “The Selena Murder Trial,” was printed in both English and Spanish - a first in TV Guide’s 43-year history.

“In south Texas we had a 70 percent increase in sales over the prior month,” said Andy Lavery, newsstand marketing manager for the weekly. “In San Antonio we had a 40 percent increase. That just goes to show what our penetration is right now.”

The magazine has plans to test the market again with a story on the undisputed queen of Spanish talk, the Miami-based, Cuban-American TV host Cristina Saralegui.

“The Spanish-language market is a vital one, and we’re encouraged by the sales of Selena to look at future covers and stories in TV Guide,” said Steven Reddicliffe, editor in chief.

The magazine questioned how big a draw Selena would be on the East Coast, where Caribbean music is much bigger than Tejano.

Nobody will be paying more attention to the Hispanic market as a result of Selena’s death than Hollywood.

“Selena,” starring Puerto Rican Jennifer Lopez and directed by Mexican-American Nava (“El Norte,” “Mi Familia”), is seen by many in the industry as a litmus test.

“If the movie opens big, if it makes an impact at the box office, it will change the way Hollywood perceives the Latino market,” Nava said from Los Angeles, where he was wrapping up editing on “Selena.” “If it does well, it will send shock waves through the industry.”

Why it took Selena being murdered for mainstream America to recognize the Hispanic market as a force to be reckoned with is difficult to understand. But Isabel Valdes, president of Hispanic Market Connections in Los Altos, Calif., and an instructor in a communications seminar for publishers at Stanford University, has her own take after years of frustration.

“I have always asked, ‘When are you going to do something major in the Hispanic market?’ Because there has been this major informational gap when it comes to Hispanic popular culture - not from Latin America, but U.S.-generated. When were they going to do something? When Selena died, that’s when.”