The Tejano icon’s cultural legacy is the basis for a fascinating UTSA course.
Selena rides in a carriage during a performance at the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo at the Houston Astrodome in 1995.It’s been nearly two years since Sonya Alemán introduced a course at the University of Texas at San Antonio about the late, legendary Tejano singer Selena.There’s been a Netflix series devoted to her, a popular podcast series, 25th anniversary theater screenings this month for the Selena biopic that made a star of Jennifer Lopez and talk of a new Selena album .
The cruel, tragic nature of Selena’s death did not make her an icon. It simply made non-Latinos aware of the iconic status she already possessed among Latino music fans. Over the next few years, Garcia struggled to find a sense of identity. In El Paso, she never felt American enough. When she visited family and friends in Juarez over the weekends, she never felt Mexican enough.
Alemán traces the class’s genesis to 2015, when she was teaching a UTSA course, Latino Cultural Expressions, which surveyed all the cultural products that have come out of Latino communities. “It kind of clicked into place for me that there was an opportunity to explore how they understood her versus my understanding of her.”Alemán will be teaching her Selena course again this summer, from May 31-July 5. For the first time, there will be 10 slots available for non-students who want to audit the course.
“I think that she would have continued along the trajectory that she clearly saw for herself. I think she probably would have been the first kind of celebrity/businesswoman,” Alemán said.
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