At 50, The Late Tejano Star Selena is Bigger Than Ever

DALLAS — Selena, the songstress who rode a wave of Tejano hits to superstardom in the '90s, would have celebrated her 50th birthday Friday. A series of observances marked the occasion, and in less than a month, Selena returns to the small screen courtesy of Netflix.

For many Texans — including Beyoncé — she remains an icon. Her well documented rise to fame inside a conservative family also made her an inspiration to a generation of gender non-conformists who grew up knowing her only from the body of work she left behind.

By modern metrics, Selena also regularly outperforms blues belter Janis Joplin, her only other Lone Star competition. This year, Spotify listeners have already streamed her music more than 213 million times.

That's all the more remarkable considering that Selena's life span is actually shorter than Joplin's. Selena was killed at 23 by the manager of her fan club in 1995. Just the year before, her live album won a Grammy as the Best Mexican-American album, and Dreaming, released after her murder, posted a staggering 170,000 copies sold — in its first day on the market.

Untimely death seems to have only burnished her image, as fans and journalists alike continue to debate how Selena might have fit into the music industry she helped to reshape. The music business itself seems to have tilted on an axis in her direction over the quarter century since her passing. She intentionally recorded in English as well as Spanish, and many of today's most successful hip-hop artists lean heavily into Latin rhythms, punctuate those rhythms with sparkling horn sections and often boast bilingual rappers.

And absolutely central to keeping Selena's image alive is Netflix, as the streaming service has been documenting her rise from obscurity with Selena: The series, which just added a new trailer last week in advance of the show's premiere May 4.

While the show itself is well worth watching, it too sets off a chain reaction of "what if's" in the viewer's mind. Knowing that her view of people was no less expansive than her multi-culti approach to music, it's easy to imagine her alive and still burning with creative ideas.

It's also easy to picture her scanning the current social landscape. Perhaps she'd marvel at how, as we rip at one corner of the fabric that binds Americans together, we're simultaneously weaving our cultures together at another.