Encore: The podcast 'Anything For Selena' tells a story larger than the artist's life

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Maria Garcia, host of "Anything For Selena." The podcast tells the story of Selena Quintanilla's life and Garcia's childhood spent on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Transcript

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Selena Quintanilla was known as the queen of Tejano music.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AMOR PROHIBIDO")

SELENA: (Singing in Spanish).

SHAPIRO: Nearly three decades after her tragic death, Selena's father, Abraham, says a new album is set to be released sometime in the near future. According to Quintanilla, the first song on the new album is one Selena recorded when she was just a teenager. And this past weekend would have been Selena's 51st birthday. So we're going to revisit an interview I did about a podcast that chronicles her life. The show "Anything For Selena" doesn't begin with the singer's biography or her most popular tunes. Instead, it starts on the U.S.-Mexico border. The host, Maria Garcia, describes a plant that grows there - creosote.

(SOUNDBITE OF CLIP, "ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST")

MARIA GARCIA: It has this unforgettable smell when it rains. It's slightly floral, but mostly it's this very specific cool, earthy, desert aroma. And there's usually a calm, clear breeze, which carries these concentrated little pockets of fragrance.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COMO LA FLOR")

SELENA: (Singing in Spanish).

SHAPIRO: Selena died at the age of 23, killed by the president of her fan club in 1995. And this podcast is about Selena and her music, but it's also about the host herself. So I asked Maria Garcia why she wanted to begin the first episode with this very specific description of a place.

GARCIA: Because it's the place that made me. I feel like that place isn't just this, like, boundary on land. That place also feels like this gash inside of me. I was born in Ciudad Juarez. We moved to the states when I was 3. But we went to Mexico every week. And so my early life was literally split down the middle in two countries, the U.S. during the week at school where I was Mary, where the first day of school, my teacher just decided to Anglicize my name without the permission of my parents - and so being Mary half of the week and being Maria in Mexico the other half. And I was so aware that in either side of the border, it felt like the half of me was missing. And so I couldn't tell Selena's story without including that lens.

SHAPIRO: Explain why the story that you tell about Selena is so relevant to this story that you tell about yourself being split down the middle by this border.

GARCIA: Because she was the very first person I witnessed who embodied these two parts of myself. And she did it with such grace. And even at a young age, it was astounding to me to see a woman who was so proud of this identity that felt like it had been derided by the world. You know, when I was a young girl, I would go back to Mexico. And my cousins and my friends there started calling me a pocha, you know, which is a horrible insult in Mexico.

And it's made against somebody who, you know, has sort of like ruined the culture and the language with this sort of crass working-class sensibility. And so I felt this rejection forming in Mexico. And then in the U.S., I also felt out of place. And so to see somebody who was beloved in both places without compromising herself, without sort of contorting herself, without code switching, even at such a young age, was incredibly profound for me.

SHAPIRO: So there was a big hurdle that you had to clear before you could even begin to tell this story. What was it?

GARCIA: Well, we couldn't make this podcast without her art, without Selena's songs.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BIDI BIDI BOM BOM")

SELENA: (Singing in Spanish).

GARCIA: And I knew that I had to get the green light from her father, from Mr. Quintanilla, who is notorious for sort of guarding her legacy with an iron fist.

SHAPIRO: And so the family actually turned you down. They denied your request for permission. And then before the pandemic, you flew to Texas without any guarantee of a meeting with Mr. Quintanilla, Selena's father. I know that you can't read his mind, but given that so many people had given him the same talking points that you gave him, if you had to guess what it was in that personal meeting that you brought that others did not, that made him change his mind and say, yes, like, what would you guess?

GARCIA: I think it's that I genuinely wanted to know him. I wanted to really understand the person who raised Selena. And Selena talked about him all of the time, not just as her father but, like, as her mentor, as a sort of a guiding light in her creative force. And they had a huge, huge bond as artists, not just as father and daughter. And that story, like, it hasn't truly been told, like, the complexity of their relationship. And it shed light to me on these narratives about Latino fatherhood and Latino daughters and all these sort of, like, stereotypes we have up there. I just wanted to capture him as a human, like, not as this figure, not as sort of like the force behind her career. But I wanted to know him.

SHAPIRO: It seems like right now there is this boom in love for this young woman who was killed in 1995. I mean, there was a popular Netflix series. There's your podcast. And I could give other examples. Why do you think that is?

GARCIA: I think there's a few reasons for it. One is there's a coming of age of people like me, people who have grown up in the age of so-called Selenedad (ph), which is this idea that she's become sort of the symbol - right? - for solidarity among Latinos.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BAILA ESTA CUMBIA")

SELENA: (Singing in Spanish).

GARCIA: And two, we just haven't advanced that much in representation. Like, she was radical in the mid-'90s because even in Latin America, there just wasn't - there just weren't women like her on TV, women with brown skin, a sort of like curvaceous body, people who, you know, clearly had Indigenous heritage in Latin America.

You know, most of the people in telenovelas or on, you know, just regular programming were white Mexicans or white Latin Americans with light-colored eyes and very thin. And that's why it was so powerful. That's why Mexico fell in love with her, you know, because people - journalists there were like, wow, she is a star of the people. She looks like the people. And so to this day, she's a symbol we hold onto.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DREAMING OF YOU")

SELENA: (Singing) I'll be dreaming of you tonight. Till tomorrow, I'll be holding you tight.

SHAPIRO: Maria Garcia is host of the podcast "Anything For Selena," produced by WBUR in partnership with Futuro Studios. Thank you so much.

GARCIA: Ari, thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.