There haven’t been many musicians like Selena Quintanilla: she was a Tejano superstar who managed to find major label mainstream success as one of the music industry’s first Latin artists to top the charts. Her dazzling career was cut tragically short when she was murdered by a fan in the spring of 1995, just before her 24th birthday. A 1997 film, Selena, which starred Jennifer Lopez in the titular role, solidified her legend — anointing her as a pop culture saint and a bridge between cultures.
The real Selena Quintanilla, however, was a complex person with an interior life beyond her star persona and her tragic death. She’s a person whose life is worth diving deeper into, beyond the constraints of a two-hour Hollywood picture. In…