2010-04-05 11:59:46

THE PURPLE INTERVIEW: Texas Monthly Staff Reporter Pam Colloff Talks The Magic, Mystery and Mythos Of Selena

Filed under: Featured, Music, Pam Colloff, Selena, The Purple Interview
Posted by: John

Last week marked the 15th anniversary of the murder of pop star Selena Quintanilla Perez, and it may seem morbid to take note of it, but we have our very good reasons.

One, her music fulfilled the prime Purple directive; i.e. to cross borders, break down barriers and generally  shake up the genres for the greater good of pop culture and society.  Selena broke unprecedented ground for Latin culture in mainstream American pop culture, opening the doors to other artists through her life and death, quite a feat for a girl who didn’t live to see her thirtieth birthday.

Two, Texas Monthly has a superb cover story on the subject, an oral history compiled by reporter Pamela Colloff, who spoke with a vast range of people connected to the recording artist, including members of her family, childhood friends, music executives and business partners. The story, as chronicled through these voices, is deeply compelling and shouldn’t be missed.

Three, Selena was a Texan, and as a website with a proud Texan heritage, we like to remind people from time to time of the many sides of a much-maligned state.

For those who haven’t read her stuff in Texas Monthly, Pamela Colloff is a reporter with an eye for richly complex and often tragic stories that break off a large slice of human experience and illuminate it in startling ways. Purple State readers may remember our posts on the Texas A&M bonfire tragedy and a long conversation about the Erin Caffey murders in East Texas. Both had their roots in Colloff stories.

The Selena piece finally compelled me to ask her to do a Purple Interview, and she was kind enough to oblige.

Q:Selena Quintanilla Perez died 15 years ago, but she’s long since turned into an icon, and maybe even something more. By the end of the story, a reader is left with the very strong feeling that she’s become a secular saint to some of her fans. How would you describe her legacy?

A:Selena has definitely become a folk hero, at the very least, maybe something more. Like the Virgin of Guadalupe, you can find her image on everything from key chains to some ofrendas, or altars that are made for the Day of the Dead. My interview with Antonio Zavaleta, an authority on folk religion in South Texas who is quoted in my story, only confirmed the idea that she has become a secular sort of patron saint. This celebration of Selena has all taken place, of course, within the context of our popular culture, in which celebrities are idolized and worshipped, to a certain degree.

Q:The magazine cover reinforces the effect. Can you talk at all about the decision-making process surrounding that cover? Was there any resistance to the idea of literally turning Selena into an icon?

A:The idea stemmed from the fact that people made shrines in the wake of Selena’s death. The brilliant illustrator who did this cover, Marc Burkhardt, has written quite eloquently on his blog about the creative process that went into making this image. Here is a link for your readers. We have received a handful of letters that have been critical of the cover, but otherwise the response has been quite positive—with one notable exception. The Quintanillas, who are Jehovah’s Witnesses and therefore do not believe in elevating or worshipping an individual, did not like the cover. They have written a letter stating their thoughts that we will be publishing. They were, however, pleased with the actual story itself.

Q:What prompted the story? Obviously, the anniversary of Selena’s death offers a peg, but was there an awareness beforehand of the extent to which her stature had grown over the years? Have the people you interviewed ever spoken as openly about her life, work and death before?

A: Selena’s death was such an enormous event in Texas that we knew long ahead of time that we wanted to commemorate it in a big, important way. Joe Nick Patoski, who was a staff writer at Texas Monthly at the time of Selena’s death, wrote two cover stories about her back in 1995—one about the outpouring of grief following her murder, and one about the trial of Yolanda Saldivar. We had not revisited the subject in any substantive way since then. Allowing some time to go by allowed many of the people who were close to her to have enough distance to speak about her again. There have been some made-for-TV documentaries that have featured interviews with the family, but to my knowledge there has not been any project as far-ranging as this one that featured the actual words of the people who knew her. That said, the most in-depth exploration of Selena’s life is Joe Nick Patoski’s brilliant biography, “Como La Flor.” My understanding is that Selena’s family didn’t cooperate, but countless other people did, and it’s an incredible piece of reporting and writing.

Q:The story feels like a massive work of reporting. Can you talk about how you tracked down the various “voices” in the story? That seems like an undertaking. How long did it take to report?

A:The two most time-consuming and challenging aspects of “writing” an oral history are tracking down all of the people you need to tell the story, and then managing the wealth of information you have, once you have conducted interviews. With this story, I started with Selena’s family and then moved outward to record executives and band mates, and then outward further to the more ancillary figures. Each person I talked to suggested other people for me to talk to—though, unfortunately, they had all lost track of one another, so I still had to track people down myself. I wasted an enormous amount of time trying to find the seven different people who were working at the Days Inn when Selena was shot. Some have fallen off of the face of the earth; others did not return my letters and phone calls; and still others found the entire event to be so traumatic that they still could not speak to me about it. There were two individuals in particular who were at the motel that day who I had a very long back-and-forth with, trying to convince them to speak to me. In the end, however, I had to ask the district attorney to narrate her death.

Q:Was there one person who proved to be a key to reaching the rest? Did the Quintanilla family take some convincing, for instance, or were they generally open to the idea of going back into this painful history?

A:The Quintanilla family was open to speaking with me, so long as Yolanda Saldivar was not the focus of the story. Unfortunately, there have been a lot of tabloid-style stories featuring Saldivar and her “revelations” about Selena. (Saldivar, for example, claims to have Selena’s secret diary; many of the other claims she has made about Selena and her family are too far-fetched and grotesque to repeat here.) I assured the family that I was interested in celebrating Selena’s life, and we went from there.

Q:By the end of this very sad story, it was hard to read the words of Chris Perez, Selena’s husband. Was that a painful interview to do?

A:It was a particularly painful interview to do because we had to speak by phone. His schedule was so busy that a phone interview was all he had time for. I’ve done this job long enough that I have become used to asking people extremely sensitive, nosy questions about their lives, but this was a difficult interview to do, nonetheless.

Q:You tried to speak to Yolanda Saldivar, Selena’s murderer, but Saldivar declined to participate. Can you say anything about the effort to do that interview?

A:When I began working on this story, I sent an introductory letter to Abraham Quintanilla and another one to Yolanda Saldivar. Suzette Quintanilla immediately responded to my letter and explained the family’s position about only wanting to cooperate on a story that did not focus on Saldivar. I agreed to that, and, as luck would have it, I received a letter from Saldivar several days later saying that she did not wish to speak to me. (She often turns down interview requests from English-language media.) Normally, I would have written her back and tried to persuade her to talk to me. But given my conversations with the Quintanillas—and given what I was learning, through my research, about just what an unreliable narrator Saldivar was—I thought it best to not badger her about giving me an interview.

Q:How about your own experience of the Selena phenomenon? Had you ever been a fan or did you take a crash course in her sound while working on the story? Is there one song that summons up for you what makes her great as a musical artist?

A:Like a lot of Anglos in Texas, I knew nothing about Selena until her death. I read a lot about her when she died, and then saw the Hollywood biopic, starring Jennifer Lopez. But I didn’t actually get interested in her music until later on, when I wrote several stories about teenage girls in Texas. Without fail, at some point in my reporting of those stories, the girls I would be writing about would either start playing or singing along to the song “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.” I’ve really come to love that song. It’s one of Selena’s best-known songs, so it’s an obvious choice, but it has such a happy, exuberant feel to it, and you can’t get it out of your head once you hear it.

Q:There is a lot of discussion about the ethnic implications of her stardom. She seems to have been a major figure in a kind of Hispanic awakening in this country. Or is that overstated?

A:No, I think that’s absolutely true. It’s easy to forget, fifteen years later, what a big deal it was to be a “mainstream” Hispanic pop star. Since Selena, we’ve had Jennifer Lopez (who became famous, of course, by playing Selena), Shakira, Ricky Martin, Christina Aguilera, Enrique Iglesias, and so on. But that was not the case in the early 1990s. The only role model was Gloria Estefan, who is more fair-skinned than Selena was.

Q:By the time people read this, the anniversary of her death will have come and gone. How was she remembered in Texas last week?

A:Aside from a lot of news stories about Selena, I must confess that I’m not entirely sure how her death was commemorated. The event that I’m the most excited about is a birthday party for Selena that is being held in Austin in two weeks at the Texas State History Museum. There’s going to be a gigantic Selena cake, Selena karaoke, a piñata, act activities (including a make-your-own Selena album cover project), you name it.

Q:Texas often gets a bad rap for being a bastion of one kind of musical and political sensibility, but the story of Selena has always been a great example of the range of cultural life in the state. It may be my state pride coming through, but I couldn’t help thinking that her particular sound and style were made possible, at least in part, by the state’s wild mix of sensibilities and ethnicities. Is there truth to that?

A:Absolutely! I’m so glad that you “got” that. Where else could a girl be exposed to such a diversity of musical styles, languages, and culture, all of which informed her music? Tejano culture, like Selena’s music, straddles two worlds.

Q:You had a lot of time to get to know this young woman through the people who knew her and loved her. What’s your favorite thing about her?

A:There’s a wonderful story that didn’t make it into the final article, which José Behar, the former president of EMI Latin, told me. Once, Behar kept Selena waiting in his office for a half hour. Selena was a busy person, of course, and she didn’t like having to wait—even for someone as important as Behar. Rather than acting like a diva, she simply spent the half-hour that she was waiting for Behar decorating his office with stickie notes: “I hate you,” “I will never forgive you,” etc. She put them inside his books, his desk, everywhere—you name it. Behar told me “I laughed for a week afterward.” He would open a drawer, and there would be another note. I thought this really captured what Selena was all about: She was a very driven person, but she had a great sense of humor, too, which she used to make her point with Behar. Sadly, this story, and many other great stories had to be cut because my first draft was more like a book than a magazine article.

I’d buy that book! Thanks to Pam Colloff for taking time out to do a Purple Interview.

Comments (1)

1 Comment »

1. this a lovely article, i’m one of her fans tha would never forget her , thanks

   Comment by elisa — April 6, 2010 @ 7:52 pm

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