Another year, another Selena Quintanilla project. This time, at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where a new documentary titled Selena y Los Dinos is set to premiere. The new film about the life and legacy of Selena is set to include “never-before-seen footage from the family’s personal archive.” And Mexican-American director Isabel Castro also conducted interviews with people who were close to her for the new documentary.
Selena y los Dinos follows not just the Jennifer Lopez movie in 1997, titled Selena, and the 1999 documentary Corpus: A Home Movie About Selena, but the 2020 Netflix project titled Selena: The Series, starring Christian Serratos and a recent documentary centered around her murderer, Yolanda Saldívar. This documentary, titled Selena & Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them, which was released on Oxygen, featured interviews with Saldívar and her family members.
We can’t exactly say it’s too many Selena projects, considering they’ve been spread out over almost thirty years, but we have to consider the fact that the story of what happened hasn’t changed. There haven’t been any new developments, or any new evidence coming to light, unlike in recently re-litigated cases like that of the Menendez Brothers — another popular story that has also gotten recent attention, with both a documentary and a very controversial Ryan Murphy project on Netflix titled Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story that doesn’t really focus on the story of what happened, but examines what could have happened from the perspective of many different people.
Instead, both Selena and Selena: The Series tell basically the same story, and the documentaries are just different looks at who Selena Quintanilla was, how the people in her life felt about her, and what happened. Or worse, they’re an attempt at giving the woman who murdered her a chance to tell her side of the story, something no one actually needs and Yolanda Saldívar certainly doesn’t deserve. And at this point, it’s all starting to feel more than a little exploitative.
Selena’s legacy is, at this point, pretty much cemented. Sometimes, for lesser-known figures, projects of this type can serve to bring the memory of someone who, perhaps, the general public didn’t get to appreciate the way they should have, into the general consciousness. That isn’t the case with Selena. If she wasn’t well-known before the 1997 movie, which a lot of people would argue she was, then that would have done the trick. The rest is just icing on the cake. Perhaps, it’s icing that’s crossed the point of using her legacy to profit from her memory instead of celebrating her.
What Selena did, what she accomplished, and what she created, are things that can and should be celebrated. She changed Tejano music, and she transformed the way Latine people were seen for a generation. Music wasn’t the same after Selena. Texas certainly wasn’t the same after Selena. An entire community is better off because of her legacy. But it’s possible to celebrate that without bringing AI to power new albums from Selena and cash grabs movies, TV shows, or documentaries into it. It’s possible to just keep Selena as she was, and celebrate her for what she did instead of what we wish we could have gotten.
Yes, her life was cut too short and that will always be a tragedy. But Selena Quintanilla was still an icon for what she did in life. And that’s something to be celebrated and not exploited.
