Sofia Aguilar ’21

On December 4, Selena: The Series began streaming its first nine episodes on Netflix. From its conception in 2018, the series documenting the life of Latina musician Selena Quintanilla Perez has been fraught with controversy and missteps that have left many fans and viewers unsatisfied.

I binge-watched the entire first part of the series over a single day, as the episodes were each under forty minutes long. The season ends on a well-executed cliffhanger, the fate of Selena’s romantic relationship with her band’s guitarist Chris hanging in the balance. But there are a few other reasons why I’d return to watch the rest of her story unfold.

As a Mexican-American woman like Selena, I find it difficult to be objective on the star. Selena was revered in the Tejano music scene and Latinx community during her lifetime. When she was murdered by her fan club manager Yolanda Saldívar in 1995, racial divisions opened between the Latinx community and white Americans who didn’t get what “the fuss was about.”

Latinx people were even mocked in American media, despite Selena’s fame, as she had yet to crossover to the mainstream market or become a household name across the U.S.

Since then, Selena’s identity, memory, and significance as a Latinx icon has been fiercely protected by her family, fans and the Latinx community alike. I come from a generation that grew up playing her music in the house and religiously watching Gregory Nava’s 1997 film Selena, starring Jennifer Lopez.

Like the show, the film focuses on Selena’s life from her childhood playing music in her family’s garage to selling out concert venues to her murder. Yet Nava focuses solely on Selena, fleshing her out into a person past her public persona, romantic life, and career. Because the film makes the viewer feel as though they truly know her, it left a legacy almost as impactful as Selena’s. It cemented her iconic status, made Lopez a household name, and gave rise to important conversations about Latinx representation in entertainment.

Needless to say, I had both reservations and high expectations about Selena: The Series from the start.

One of my biggest issues is the casting choice for Selena, which erased her Mexcican Indigeniety and perpetuated the desirability of European features. Half-Mexican, half-Italian actor Christian Serratos, who plays Selena, deeply understands the dichotomy of her character; both of them were born out of two cultures and are often pressured to pick one over the other. Throughout the show, Serratos portrays this experience beautifully.

However, one look at Serratos’s Instagram feed reveals a woman fit for the cast of a Mexican telenovela, many of which exclusively cast actors with European features as the main characters. Serratos, though beautiful, completely contradicts Selena’s darker skin and more Indigenous features.

Why is this so important?

Selena was an icon not only because of her fashion and music, but also because she successfully resisted European standards of beauty in the U.S. and Latin America. This was extraordinary, given that in many Latinx cultures, colorism and racism dominate the media and affects how marginalized groups, especially Black and Indigenous people, are represented and treated.

Selena was and continues to be a role model for many in the Latinx community, particularly young women and girls who rarely see themselves represented in entertainment, government or similar positions of power.

I still find myself asking, to what extent can we embrace actors like Serratos embodying such revolutionary stories like Selena’s?

Even with an actor better suited to the role, the show would have still suffered for how little Selena actually appears and is given serious focus within the episodes.

The majority of the show is told through the eyes of everyone in her family but her. These perspectives were missing from the original 1997 film, and to a certain extent brought depth and nuance to the story. I enjoyed learning about Selena’s older brother A.B., who was the creative mind behind many of her early hits. The show even featured songs of Selena’s that I hadn’t heard before, like “Dame un Beso” and “I Could Fall in Love.” On paper, threading more of her family’s perspectives into her story benefits the show immensely.

However, it became a problem when their narratives overshadowed Selena’s own journey and inner conflicts.

Rather than seeing Selena as a flawed and complex person, we watch A.B. struggling to balance family life with work as a musician on the road, all while trying not to crack under the expectations of his father to keep writing hit songs for Selena. We watch Selena’s older sister Suzanne go from resenting the drums to becoming a respected female drummer in the male-dominated Tejano music scene.

Even their father Abraham contends with struggles of his own, pressuring his children into music careers to feed the family and keep a roof over their heads while also revealing rare moments of vulnerability and tenderness.

Selena receives none such attention. For all we are told about her family, her career, and her life, we end up knowing very little about Selena in a show that’s named after her.

Via Netflix, Selena: The Series — *Via Netflix,* Selena: The Series

For much of the show’s runtime, she’s a side character who smiles and accepts events as they occur. We never discover how she feels about the pressure from her father to succeed and the threat of poverty and even homelessness if her career doesn’t take off. Her personality and her inner life is never explored or deepened in the same way as her family members.

Instead, the show worships Selena as a saint and a martyr. She remains an image frozen in time, free from imperfection. Doing so fails to portray her as a complex human being with interests or conflicts outside of her romantic relationships, music and fashion. When her legacy and mythos is taken away, who is she really?

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Her family, as producers for all media about Selena, wants to protect this cemented image of perfection rather than possibly disillusion her fans about the person she really was. Their perspectives will be told instead because they are the ones writing her story. But it begs the question of who the show was really created for and who it best represents.

While watching Selena: The Series, I kept wanting to switch to the 1997 film instead. The show added little to the story of Selena or to the representation of the Latinx community that the original film didn’t already celebrate –– and much more effectively.

Yet I also started feeling like I should just accept the breadcrumbs I’m being offered –– should I really be so harsh? Stories of the Latinx community, and especially stories that portray Latinx success rather than gang violence and drug deals are so rare in mainstream media, and not every representation of us will be perfect. But isn’t that yet another reason to take a critical approach?

The fact that we are so rarely represented warrants a certain level of skepticism even towards media that isn’t about iconic figures like Selena. When we’re living under a presidential administration that forcibly separated Latin American children from their families in ICE detention centers, stereotyped Mexicans as criminals, and used the construction of the border wall between Mexico and the U.S. as a racist selling point, the media that represents Latinx people is incredibly sensitive and significant. To both embrace and critique it like any other piece of art paves the way for future generations to improve.

For all its flaws, Selena can be neatly summarized by a rather ironic exchange between Selena’s father Abraham and his wife Marcella in episode nine. “For some of these people, they’ve never been that close to a star. They forget that there is a real person there,” he tells her. The show, it seems, forgets this too.

The second part of Selena: The Series is expected to release on Netflix early next year.

OPINION: Selena: The Series Struggles to Shine