Selena Quintanilla – Yolanda Saldivar’s Motive Still a Mystery 15 Years Later

LOS ANGELES (LALATE) – Yolanda Saldivar’s motive in the murder of Selena Quintanilla Perez  still remains a mystery fifteen years later. As the film “Selena” rebroadcasts on tv this weekend, one question that will remain unanswered is Saldivar’s motive for murdering Selena. Fans of the Tejano singer, police and the Quintanilla family were left with no answers after the tragic shooting in 1995. In the decades that have followed, Saldivar has continued to claim it was all an accident.

But perhaps the bigger question is whether music history will properly record Selena’s impact on the crossover of Latin singers into the English music market. In the late 1990s, music fostered a boom of latin musicians with crossover attempts. But far before any of those attempts, there was one artist dubbed the top Latin artist of the ’90s and best selling Latin artist of the decade by Billboard Magazine who was charting new territories. Fourteen top ten singles and seven number ones earned Selena Quintanilla the title of Queen of Tejano music.

So why would Salidvar, accused of stealing money from Selena’s accounts, kill her employer? The film doesn’t answer that, nor did a trial, and nor has the passing of time. Her trial defense was that it was an accident. But a trained nurse, Saldivar never called 911 nor helped Selena after the shooting. Today she is serving a life sentence and will be eligible for parole in 2025.

Selena’s impact on other musicians is profound. Selena would help make Jennifer Lopez a household name. Appearing opposite
Edward James Olmos as Selena’s father Abraham Quintanilla, Jr., and Jon Seda as Chris Perez, Lopez in “Selena” was not given the option to sing with her own voice. But perhaps more representative of Selena’s impact on music was the concert “Selena VIVE”, a live stage broadcast on Univision; it became the highest viewed Spanish language program in American tv history, generating a 35.9 Neilson household rating.