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Selena Quintanilla-Pérez (April 16, 1971 – March 31, 1995), best known as Selena, was a Mexican American singer who has been called "the Queen of Tejano music". The youngest child of a Mexican-American couple, Selena released her first album at the age of twelve. She won Female Vocalist of the Year at the 1987 Tejano Music Awards and landed a recording contract with EMI a few years later. Her fame grew throughout the early 1990s, especially in Spanish-speaking countries. Her album Selena Live! won Best Mexican-American Album at the 36th Grammy Awards and her 1994 album Amor Prohibido, which was nominated for another Grammy, produced four number one Spanish hits.
Selena attained further notability in North America after Yolanda Saldívar, the president of her fan club, murdered her at the age of 24. On April 12, 1995, two weeks after her death, George W. Bush, then the governor of Texas, declared her birthday "Selena Day" in Texas. Warner Brothers made a film based on her life starring Jennifer Lopez in 1997. As of June 2006, Selena was commemorated with a museum and a bronze life-sized statue (Mirador de la Flor in Corpus Christi, Texas). The statue and museum are visited by hundreds of fans each week.
Selena was born in Lake Jackson, Texas to a Mexican-American father, Abraham Quintanilla and a Mexican/Native American mother, Marcella Ophelia Zamora, and was raised as a Jehovah`s Witness. She began singing at the age of six; when she was nine her father founded the singing group Selena y Los Dinos, which she fronted. They initially performed at the Quintanilla family`s restaurant, "Papa Gayos", but the restaurant failed shortly afterwards.
The family soon went bankrupt and was evicted from its home. Taking their musical equipment in an old bus, they relocated near relatives in Corpus Christi, Texas, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico . There, they performed wherever they could: at street corners, parties, weddings, quinceañeras, and fairs. These efforts at spreading their names paid off in 1984 when Selena was twelve years old, when she recorded her first record for a local record company. The album was not sold in stores, and her father & mother bought all of the original copies. It was re-released in 1995 under the title Mis Primeras Grabaciones.
Selena did well in school, but as she grew more popular in music, the travel demands of her performances began to interfere with her education, causing many missed Fridays and Mondays. (The family traveled all over Texas and as far away as Idaho.) Her parents pulled her out of school altogether when she was in eighth grade. She continued her education on the road; at the age of seventeen she earned her high school diploma from The American School of Correspondence, based in Chicago. Selena released her second album, Alpha, in 1986.
In early 1995, the Quintanillas discovered that Yolanda Saldívar, the president of Selena`s fan club and the manager of her boutiques, was stealing money from the boutiques and decided to fire her. Soon after the fallout, Selena agreed to meet Saldívar in a Days Inn hotel in Corpus Christi on the morning of March 31, 1995 to retrieve paperwork for tax purposes.
At the hotel, Selena demanded the missing financial papers. Saldívar delayed the handover by claiming she had been raped in Mexico. The singer drove Saldívar to a local hospital where doctors found no evidence of rape. Saldívar returned to the motel where Selena
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