Content area
Full Text
As is proper in Texas, especially in Corpus Christi, our group gave thanks for the Whataburger. "Thank you, Jesus, for the food we're about to eat," intoned Sylvia D. over her number one combo with cheese. "Bless the hands that made it and the good company I'm in." She took a bite. "Mmmm, thank you, Lord."
Amen. Strictly speaking, though, it wasn't Jesus who had brought our group together on this cloudy spring day. It wasn't even the Whataburger. Rather, it was another of God's and Corpus Christi's children: Selena Quintanilla-Perez. Just Selena, if you please.
The legendary singer, who was murdered 20 years ago, on March 31, 1995, would have approved of our sacrament. As with nearly every other detail of her brief 23 years on earth, Selena's love of Whataburger is well documented. In the early days of her career, when she traveled around Texas with her family band, her father-slash-manager, Abraham Quintanilla, paid her and her siblings-slash-bandmates in Whatameals; when, at age 17, she accepted the award for Female Vocalist of the Year at the 1989 Tejano Music Awards, she reportedly yelled, "Whataburgers for everyone!" So it seemed fitting for our small congregation to partake in the daily bread of the Queen of Tejano, a down-home girl with talent and drive. Una artista del pueblo, they called her. "An artist of the people."
There were seven of us, and we were feeling jovial and optimistic, unaware of the wrath that our devotion would soon incur. That crisis was at least an hour away. We represented a near-perfect cross section of Selena admirers--majority female, diverse in ethnicity, national identity, age, and sexual orientation. Those at our table included a Stripes convenience store employee whom Sylvia D. had brought closer to the Lord; a skinny pop singer with blond stubble and his female friend; a young man sporting discount tattoos who had driven thirteen and a half hours from Georgia; and a Selena impersonator.
At the center sat Sylvia D.--full name Sylvia Dancer--a voluminous personality packed into a pretty, compact frame. Between bites, the cheerful 53-year-old with a tightly pulled ponytail outlined the itinerary for the next day's Selena tribute she was organizing at Molina Veterans Park, a city-block-size field in the neighborhood where...