Tuesday, November 16, 2004

I wrote the following paragraphs for my Chicano Studies 100 course. It’s a review of Selena, the movie.

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The movie Selena has Texas as its setting and it covers the period from Abraham’s youth in the 1960s and most of Selena’s life, up until the mid 1990s. Selena’s parents owned a house in Lake Jackson. During a family gathering her father is shown playing the guitar, isolated from the rest of the family. The music pulls Selena from the crowd and brings her to the porch where her father, Abraham, is singing “We Belong Together.” Selena joins him and by the time their rendition is finished, Abraham is ready to give stardom another chance. A dream is re-born.

The fact is that Abraham was initially alone in his dream. His wife tried to convince him out of it reminding him that Selena, Suzette, and A. B. were only kids and needed to lead as life as such. Abraham, however, had made up his mind and his wife’s pleads went unheard, along with Suzette’s “Girls don’t play the drums,” A. B.’s “I love to listen to [Rock and Roll], not playing it,” and Selena’s “We’d rather go outside and play.”

Selena’s career had its ups and downs. Soon after coming up with the idea of having a band, Abraham decided to run a restaurant. He figured that money was to be made in this town inhabited by Gringos who would love to eat Mexican food. Abraham was right. The food prepared by Selena’s mother, Marcela, in conjunction with the music played by Selena y Los Dinos created an ambience that made the restaurant prosperous for nine whole months. In the end, however, Papagayo’s brought the Quintanillas to their knees and forced them to sell their home and business and move in with Uncle Hector.

It was not until the Harlingen fiasco, though, that Selena really felt discouraged to continue her quest for stardom. After her presentation, the scattered applauses were suffocated by the booing that was being done by most of the attendees. Abraham was not going to let his children go down, though. He gave them a peptalk during a family visit to the beach. It is on this visit to the beach that Marcela gave Selena her first cumbia dancing lesson, a genre of music that became vital to her success.

The rest of the movie focuses on Selena’s adult life. Chris joins the band and in due time he and Selena fall in love. It is at about that time that Selena develops quite a following in Mexico, attracting the attention of the press and the pesos of over a hundred thousand people at her concerts. By this time she had also made an incursion into the clothing design market and was seeing success. Two of her dreams had come true, but two would go unfulfilled — owning a farm and raising a family — for her life was snatched by the hands of her fan club president, Yolanda Salvidar.

No doubt about it, Yolanda Salvidar is the movie’s antagonist. The film is quick to portray her as such. Within seconds of being introduced, she is shown asking Selena “What’s that?” after Selena had signed some documents in her presence. When the clipboard was brought to Selena again for her to sign, Yolanda asked “Is that the same sheet?” Yolanda was obsessed with keeping track of every aspect of Selena’s business as if it were her own. She is also depicted as a lángara — very astute. Seeking even more control of Selena’s business matters, she offered to take care of the business inventory when Selena sought to bring with her to Los Angeles the person who was normally in charge of that aspect of the business. Then, when Selena’s mother and friends wanted to get her a gift, Yolanda volunteered to take the money that had been chipped in and use it to buy “the perfect ring that she would love.” Yolanda did in fact buy the ring and give it to Selena, but she claimed it as a gift thought out and fulfilled solely on her own. “I bought you a little present,” said Yolanda, the epitome of a sycophant. It is through bootlicking that she won the trust of the Quintanillas and came to control the ins and outs of Selena’s fan club and boutique in Corpus Christi.

Of course, the two protagonists are Selena and her father, Abraham. Selena is shown as living up to the role of the Mexican-American daughter who abides by her parents’ expectations. Well, except in matters of love. Although explicitly forbidden by her father to date Chris, Selena continues to see him behind her family’s back. Her quest for stardom and the wellbeing of her family would take a backseat when it came to her love for Chris. Abraham, on the other hand, placed stardom at the top of his list. He would often be confronted by his wife for this reason. Playing a supportive role, Marcela would remind him that Selena and her siblings were only kids and should not have their childhood taken from them. If nothing more can be said of Abraham, it must be noted that it was he who first conceived the idea of a Quintanilla reaching stardom. Furthermore, it is he who would awaken the dream whenever the family felt the light was dimming. He would push them to go on, sometimes with compliments and other times with what he deemed was constructive criticism.

Perhaps because Abraham Quintanilla was the executive producer, the film Selena shows Latino images as well as gender, class, and race relations from the perspective of a Chicano. Latinos are portrayed in high regards. The familia is shown as cohesive and harmonious, and the one scene that involved cholos depicted them as down-to-earth, amicable, and self-less. Abraham is the head of household and not even his wife comes close to exerting the same magnitude of power over the family. Abraham makes the decisions and his family must abide by them. The wife is free to give her opinion but in the end it carries no weight. This is evident in three instances: Abraham’s decision to start a band consisting of his offsprings; his decision to open a restaurant; and his forbiddance of Selena dating Chris. It is worth nothing that as soon as Abraham accepted Chris as the husband of his daughter, Chris was welcomed into the family by Selena’s mother and siblings. Abraham’s say made all the difference.

Abraham’s not always portrayed as the one in power, though. During the recap of his life as a musician, he is shown being rejected by a White club owner on the basis that his club was whites-only. Abraham then decides to play at a Mexican restaurant, figuring that nobody would kick him “out of this joint, guys. After all, they are Tejanos and Mexicanos like us.” Boy, was he wrong! Men and women alike expressed their outrage. They wanted “real” music. As Abraham put it to his own kids decades after the incident, “We got to be more Mexican than the Mexican, and more American than the American; both at the same time. It’s exhausting! Nobody knows how tough it is to be a Mexican-American.”

Selena, too, experienced her share of mistreatments as a result of being a minority. When she inquired about a dress for her friend, a White salesperson unequivocally said to her, “I don’t think you’d be interested in that one. That dress is 800 dollars.” Even among people of the same color as her would make her the subject of scrutiny. During a tour in Mexico a promoter said to Abraham, “The press is going to shred us to pieces. No one told us she doesn’t speak Spanish well.” In addition, she also had to deal with the fact that she was a woman. After a concert that the Quintanillas thought had gone well, an organizer named Juan Luis hands Abraham their cut of the profits, 620 dollars, justifying the underpayment by saying that Selena was “just a woman.”

Selena and her family had come to internalize the discrimination they had once been subjected to. One of the reasons why Abraham objected to Selena seeing Chris was that Abraham, like Chris, had come “from the streets, I know what a bum musician is.” In the same scene he turns to Selena and says “Of course he loves you. You’re young, you’re beautiful, and you’re rich.” Just as her husband, Marcela, too, expressed a low opinion of those she had once been like. When reminding Abraham that they had made many sacrifices to be where they were, owning a home in a nice neighborhood, she added that they did it all because “You wanted something better for the kids. Better than the barrio.” To further push the idea that her children should not be in the music business, she added that “Tejano music is all men. Women are not successful.” Additionally, she thought Selena was wrong for wanting to marry Chris at such a tender age. When Selena brought up the fact that Abraham and Marcela had married young, she responded “I was the daughter of poor farm workers. We didn’t have any choices.”

Tenacity as a key element to success is a theme found in Selena. As a child, Selena dreamt of being loved by the masses because “When I’m up on stage I feel like I can be anything I want to be.” In order to achieve this dream she had to cling to it through thick and thin, allowing her father’s contagious unrelentingness to become her own. That she did, and the story of her life came to exemplify the strenuous pursuit of a dream, and its rewarding fulfillment.

Love is a sub-theme present in Selena. Selena is weakened, blinded, and empowered by love. When Cupid’s arrow made its way to her heart, Selena could not help swaying the foundation of la familia. She could not see in Chris what her father saw. She saw the man she loved, and nothing more. She felt that their love would push them through difficult situations, including the sorrow of being disowned by her whole family, if it came to that. She went against her father’s will in the name of love, but it was love itself — made manifest between parent and child — that kept the family from falling apart.

Watching Selena brought to mind Lisa Dietrich’s essay on machismo and femininity, specifically the notion of motherhood and submissiveness. Marcela adheres to the feminine ideal discussed in Dietrich’s essay, having given birth to three children and her abidance to her husband’s resolutions. When Selena confided to her mother the plan to bear children, Marcela’s joy could not have been greater. That mother-daughter moment also supports Dietrich’s premise that “mothers are privy to much more affection and information about their children’s lives.” Selena’s disclosure of her fear of not being liked by the people in her crossover tour further supports the aforementioned premise.

Another essay that came to mind was, of course, Tatum’s “Cinema.” Tatum cites Gary Keller’s characteristics of Chicano cinema. The most evident characteristics in this film are code-switching and Latino music. Some examples are A. B. screaming “Come on, you bunch of burros!” and Abraham’s “Que esta pasando, Marcela?!” when he saw Selena performing with a bustier. More prevalent, though, are the mi’jas and mi’jos that follow rivers of English words. As is to be expected, most of the music is played by Selena y Los Dinos and it is mainly in Spanish. Furthermore, excluding the takes done in the Quintanillas’ restaurant, the audience members are mainly boot-wearing, hat-loving Latinos. The Quintanillas’ arrival to Uncle Hector’s town helps instill the idea that this is a film involving Chicanos. At one point a backyard — more like a junkyard, actually — is shown and the image focuses on a bicycle that has a bull’s head on its handle-bars. Seconds later the camera provides a shot of “Los Reyes,” a tire shop. The next shot shows about eight children leaving an old home that has a basketball hoop attached to a tree. The Quintanillas had made it to Uncle Hector’s town, alright!

Those who watch Selena with the mere intent of entertaining themselves will not be disappointed. It is more gratifying, however, to watch it after having spent hours upon hours reading about the experience of the Chicano. The ideas presented by the different textual authors converge with those of the creators of the movie and one cannot help but marvel how much one’s mind has been enriched by what is only an introductory course to the Chicano experience. One’s senses will only get keener in recognizing the experience of the Chicano in everyday life.

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