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SELENIDAD: SELENA, LATINOS, AND THE PERFORMANCE OF MEMORY. By Deborah Paredez. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009; pp. 288. $79.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.
A DVD-recording of Selena performing to a disco beat in a sparkling, skin-tight purple pantsuit; passages scrawled on a memorial wall in Corpus Christi, Texas; a queer tribute to Selena with an intergenerational Latina/o audience: each scene reveals how and why Selena matters. Selena Quintanilla Pérez was a superstar in Tejano music-a US-based, predominantly Spanish-language musical genre dominated by men. Although Selena "reinvented" (11) the genre and conquered the Latina/o music market with her fabulous voice, fashions, and dancing body, English-language audiences had only begun to hear (of) her when she was murdered in 1995 at the age of 23 by the president of her fan club. Latinas/ os, especially Mexican Americans from Texas (Tejanas/os), deeply mourned her loss, while the mainstream media puzzled over this outpouring of grief. Selena's death marked a new era for Latinas/ os in the US imagination: identified as a largely untapped US market, Latinas/os and their communal mourning were deemed commercial, if derisively "excessive" (15). In this impressive book, Deborah Paredez coins the term "Selenidad" to chronicle and analyze the many ways that Latinas/os have creatively and critically used the memory of Selena to negotiate their contradictory status as invisible and hypervisible subjects of the United States.
Selenidad is not about Selena, but rather about "what it means to remember her" (xi). The book's introduction historicizes the process of her canonization as a Latina icon by framing Selena's legacy for the uninitiated, identifying the...