This is How I Became Yolanda Saldivar

As Netflix releases a TV reprisal of Selena Quintanilla’s life, it’s time to ask, “Who killed Yolanda Saldivar?”
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Selena Quintanilla-Perez was killed in 1995, the year I learned how to mourn. My family was grieving the loss of my grandfather two months after Selena was killed by a woman named Yolanda Saldivar.

In my family, all of our dead become saints and legends. My grandpa became the legend of the quiet hard-working man who went from working in the fields to building irrigation pipes around Northern California to spending his retirement fishing and quietly watching football games in his recliner, initiating our family legacy as San Francisco 49ers fans. In the San Jose church where we held my grandpa’s funeral, my grandma wore sunglasses that covered her tears and stroked his cold, stiff right arm and told me, “This is just his shell, mija. It’s just his shell.”

At the cemetery, my little brother and I broke away from the final part of the funeral to play among the dead. I jumped from gravestone to gravestone like a game of hopscotch thinking about all the people buried underneath — who were they? What did their homes look like? How did they laugh? What did they like to eat? What did they dream about? But mostly I thought about Selena. People came in the thousands to see her body before it was buried. Some fans became so hysterical that they had to be escorted out of the arena where the wake was held.

We didn’t need the Catholic church to canonize Selena Quintanilla as a saint. Selena, the 23-year old Queen of Tejano, was born along the deep wound of the US-Mexico border that splits us in two and grew to be the balm and stitches with which to suture it.

She materialized at a time when we needed a saint who could deliver miracles. Selena appeared like an apparition on stage in full-bodied glittering light donned in shining metallic studded stage costumes. She was beautiful, charismatic, carefree, young, spoke English before learning Spanish, and became known for her bright red lipstick and oversized hoops — an homage to Chicana aesthetic that was ridiculed as criminal and common. Her music was a transcendent fusion of Mexican cumbia, Tejano music, synthesized techno pop, and heart-wrenching boleros. We weren't just fans; we were Juan Diego summoned to the hill of Tepeyac by the Virgin Mary herself.

Netflix

For the first time, young brown women across borders and time shared a mirror in Selena that reflected back to us the divinity in brown skin, black hair, and broken tongues.

I was 11 when I became a fan of Selena after her death. The 1997 biopic Selena became one of my most treasured possessions and the first text in which I saw myself. Like Selena, I was a product of two parents who had been slapped in school for speaking Spanish. Like her, I grew up a monolingual English speaker with roots in Texas (and obsessed with pizza). Like her, I grew up listening to disco and the doo-wop and Motown of my parents. Like her, my family and I lived in the cultural and economic crosshairs of America’s never-ending war on Mexico and Mexican-Americans. We lived through the economic massacre of Reaganomics and the brutal rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s. When our family made an epic ten-day road trip to visit family in Texas, I dragged them to one of Selena’s boutiques in Houston, where I bought a statue of Selena in her famous Grammy pose. I carefully brought it back home to Fresno and placed it on a shelf next to my Selena Barbie, which I never touched. Her image, her femininity, was untouchable.

As a kid, I was deeply feminine yet did not possess Selena’s effortless femininity. I didn’t feel like a “girl.” I was drawn to clothes from the girls section of Sears, but they never fit quite right. I had a general love for aesthetics, but I wore my knotted frizzy hair pulled back with a headband. I was obsessed with Barbies and Minnie Mouse, but I also rode bikes, played in mud, lived barefoot, splashed around in a rancid water reserve near my home. I was taller and hairier than most girls, which made me feel like a gangly beast among a flock of fluttering canaries. Despite these shortcomings, my dad called me “princess,” an anointment as the girl child who’d grow to marry a nice Chicano man and raise the next generation of respectable Chicanos to round out their American Dream.

As a kid, Yolanda Saldivar existed in my imagination as a monster. I only knew what was shown in “Selena” and what details circulated on the playground. I knew Yolanda was 34 years old at the time she killed Selena and had been stealing from the singer’s business while she worked as president of her fan club. She was Selena’s confidante, her right hand woman, and one of her closest friends. On March 31, Selena visited Yolanda at a Days Inn Motel in Corpus Christi to recover several missing bank statements. Selena turned toward the door to leave when Yolanda shot her in the back of her right shoulder, severing an artery that carries blood from the heart to the arm and the back of the brain. Selena bled to death still clutching a ring Yolanda had given her as a symbol of their friendship.

There was this unshakable feeling that Yolanda Saldivar had betrayed us. For years, I never thought I could have anything in common with the woman who killed Selena. Yolanda was Lucifer in the flesh, a trusted confidante who betrays God through a corrupted sense of pride and greed. She was the opposite of Selena in nearly every way — simple, unknown, fat, short, plain, stone-faced. She had short over-processed hair and drew her eyebrows and lips thick with liner. In photos and TV interviews, she comes across as a butch queen squeezed into a tight femme costume.

Other people who worked with Yolanda in Selena’s businesses described her as possessive and crazy. Rumors proliferated that she was a lesbian, a delusional jilted admirer who was motivated to kill because the young singer would never return her affection.

Abraham Quintanilla, Selena’s father, believed that Yolanda’s masculinity made her suspect. During her trial, he told prosecutors that he warned Selena about Yolanda, not about her sexuality but her gender. “I didn’t say she was a lesbian,” he told Nueces County District Attorney Carlos Valdez, who wrote about prosecuting the case in a book called Justice for Selena. “I said she looked very masculine so [Selena] should be careful.”

Women like this are thought of as monsters. Their moral deviance carries a threat to order and humanity. They’re inhuman. They’re shapeshifters who may appear one way, a loyal servant to Selena, and suddenly emerge as another — a killer. They exist on the “limits of knowing.” as the academic Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has written. They’re a living portrait of everything we reject in ourselves. They are hairy ugly ogres or slimy scaled reptiles. Whatever their shape, they are a dark mirror of our shame. Encountering one of these figures means you have left everything safe behind and you’re at risk of attack by these creatures who live at these borders — and, more importantly, you’re at risk of becoming one yourself.

We put women like this in prison. People — mainly Latinos across Texas — came out in droves to stand outside the courthouse where Yolanda was tried. The scene looked like crowds around a witch hanging — adults of all ages with some children in tow waving signs calling for Yolanda to die. The court decided to sentence her to life in prison, which was met with cheers outside. Soon we all forgot about Yolanda, including me.

If Selena was a promise for our future as a nation, Yolanda was a threat to its survival. It’s impossible to appreciate the depths of Selena’s sainthood without understanding her fallen angel Yolanda, the woman cast out of heaven to become a spectacle before kings on earth. Selena, the myth and legend, doesn’t exist without Yolanda. They are two mirrors reflecting pieces of ourselves back to us. They are two points on a map, two stars in the sky, the sun and moon, two galaxies forced by each other's gravitational pull. They are the dark and light side of who we are as people.

Forgetting Yolanda meant turning away from her reflection and turning away from a part of us that gave us shame. Selena became a saint in my eyes because Yolanda was a demon — a bifurcation made out of the same rigid thinking that left me feeling ashamed of being lesbian. Monsters recreate themselves. Their magic is that they never die. But I’ve learned Yolanda wasn’t the monster. It was me, us, my shame, our shame, our fears.

NETFLIX

I was 23 years old, the same age as Selena when she died, when I told my parents my secret. Unlike Selena, I’m still breathing, but we shared some kind of immutable end at that age. By how my mother cried at our kitchen table, it was clear that something was permanently lost that night.

My parents read a blog post I wrote as a reporting intern at a magazine in which I mentioned a “partner,” and they wanted to talk to me about it.

They left Fresno years earlier for a suburb of Santa Cruz, meant to be a kind of final act in their story of American success from the farm fields to retirement near the beach. Their new home was dilapidated and they never saved enough money to remodel it. We were convinced after a run-in with a spirit that the man who built the house decades ago to raise his family still haunted it.

It was there among ghosts and exposed beams that I sat with my mom and dad to come clean. My mom sat at the head of the table, I sat to her right, my dad to her left — a holy trinity.

“So I’m seeing someone, and it’s not a guy,” I said.

My mom furrowed her eyebrows and examined me intensely. “Well, you still look the same.”

“I mean yeah, mom, I’m still the same person. I haven’t changed,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes and paused. “Leticia. You’re a lesbian,” drawing out the word as if it were a murder charge. Toward the end of the conversation, she quietly cried, explaining, “It’s just a reaction, Leti. It’s just a reaction.”

A few weeks passed and my dad came to meet me for lunch near my job in the Mission District of San Francisco. He had a lot of questions.

“Did I do something that gave you a bad image of a man?” he asked.

“No, dad,” I said. “You were a good dad.”

“Ok. Did anyone hurt you?”

“No, dad. No one hurt me.”

He sat quietly, thinking. “Well, I guess you always have been hairy.”

I laughed. I didn’t correct him because it’s true and it seemed to give him some peace. He found the answer for how his youngest daughter — the girl, the feminine one, his curly-haired brown-skinned princess who danced around to Selena — could also be a member of a tribe of perverts. A woman whose heart pulses between her legs for other women, moans into their necks, presses her tongue to the throbbing wet nubs between their legs, clutching their sweaty thighs during musty sex he couldn’t imagine, didn’t dare to imagine. “I don’t care what other people do in bed,” he’d say. “It’s none of my business.” My queerness and carnal desire for other women could be explained — I was part man, part beast, part monster. I felt ashamed.

The texts I saw myself in changed dramatically between my girlhood and early adulthood, from Gregory Nava’s “Selena” to the radical women’s anthology This Bridge Called My Back, co-edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, and the work of academics like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Angela Davis. I was no longer the daughter of my family’s American Dream, but part of a movement of radical women of color feminist thinkers. And I was as self-righteous and obnoxious about it as I was about the particulars of my outfits as a kid.

I had new eyes through which to understand Selena and Yolanda. I was out to my family, and as a professional reporter, I was in a place to see Yolanda’s story differently. One day, I came across a photo I had never seen of Yolanda and Selena at Selena’s sister’s wedding. The two women smiled brightly at the camera, clutching each other’s waists in white dresses. Selena’s dress exposed her shoulders, while Yolanda wore a white suit jacket with hers. It struck me. Yolanda looked like the proud short butch newly wedded to her tall, statuesque femme lover. They looked like any couple I could scroll past on Instagram. I could have been invited to their wedding. Or maybe I could have seen them later at a party, or at one of the few remaining lesbian bars where I’d congratulate them and buy them a round of drinks to celebrate. They looked like family.

There isn’t much when it comes to texts that complicate the widely known narrative of Selena’s life, but the one I’ve found most revealing is Justice for Selena. Valdez described Yolanda’s act as a “crime of anger” and revenge motivated by greed and control over Selena, “the person that everyone loved.” He believed she released her intense hate for Abraham Quintanilla by “killing what was most precious to him: one of his children.”

It’s difficult to really know Yolanda’s motivations leading up to Selena’s murder. Yolanda didn’t respond to a letter I sent requesting an interview or comment. But at one point in taped recordings of Yolanda sequestered in her truck right after the murder, she cries, “I don’t want to be embarrassed...I don’t want to live anymore...You know why? I don’t have any dignity. I don’t have any dignity at all.”

At this point in my life, it’s surprising, but I know this reaction. Even after I came out, I couldn’t shake this feeling that there was something corrupt in me. I’d have these sudden intrusive feelings of shame that what I do in bed was unforgivable. I felt like I had committed a sin as I laid in sweaty repose after sex, a coming together of two bodies that came as natural to me as the act of falling in love. Who had I become? How did I get to this place in bed, my limbs tangled with another woman and her scent still on my fingers? What perversion led me here?

For months, I avoided eye contact with my parents. They were obsessed with how I had sex. I walked around their home as a reminder of perversion. They’d avert their gaze into my eyes or drop their head when they were in the room with me. It became clear to me that to them, the thing that separates us queers from straight people is the way we have sex. I felt stripped by their silence, violated and ashamed during that time my parents wrestled with this news. I was still their daughter, but I was their daughter who has sex with women. I wanted to disappear.

Yolanda told police that moments before she pulled the trigger, Selena repeated Abraham’s belief that she was a lesbian — a betrayal to her gender, family, nation. She was named a woman who lusts for other women, a demon in the flesh by Saint Selena herself. My impulse at being named “lesbian” was to hide; Yolanda’s seemed to be to destroy.

There are instances in the trial where Yolanda appears to be a woman unraveling as people come closer to naming her feelings toward Selena. At one point she accused Abraham of raping her and sticking a knife into her vagina, a graphic image that paints a picture of a woman who felt sexually violated by the father of the woman she was forbidden to see. Valdez asked Abraham if he ever raped Yolanda during prep for trial, which was met with ridicule. Valdez said Abraham laughed out loud and asked, “My God, have you ever seen the woman?”

Not only does this obscure the motivations behind rape (power, not desire), it suggests that only normative and pretty female bodies are capable of being raped and a masculine, lesbian-perceived body like Yolanda’s is below any normal heterosexual man’s desire for sex. Her body is so corrupt, so wrong, that it’s inhuman and bestial to want to force sex on such a thing. It’s as if he’s suggesting that to desire a masculine woman means you are not human. It reminds me of my own internal reckoning as someone whose heart melts for tomboys who played with dinosaurs and action figurines as a kid or ran around with scraped knees and elbows from climbing trees. I’m a person who recognizes the boy-girl in girls who resemble boys. Even though I might present as feminine, I recognize these monsters because I’m one of them.

Sara Khalid/Netflix

Yolanda has never said that she is a lesbian. She denied it during her trial, after her conviction and sentence, and still denies it 25 years later in a prison cell, alone. She’s serving her time in protective custody at the Mountain View Unit women’s prison in Gatesville, Texas for high-profile prisoners because of death threats and the media attention. Prisoners in this wing spend most of their days alone in 8 by 10-foot single cells with a bed, toilet, and writing table.

A lot has happened during Yolanda’s time in isolation. Anti-sodomy laws were ruled unconstitutional, same-sex marriage was legalized — affording young queers like me the opportunity to get married and divorced freely under US law — gay pride has become a massive corporate event, network TV has embraced us as daytime hosts, TV stars, corporate executives, neighbors, family. But it is still bold for me to kiss a lover in public. Holding her hand on the street would provoke stares. I still hesitate to come out in work settings. Beyond this, the statistics about queer people of color feel numbing at this point — we have some of the highest rates of suicide, unemployment, and homelessness. The American Dream wasn’t designed for us.

Yolanda is still the most hated woman in our Latinx and Chicano nation. There have been petitions to call on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to keep Yolanda locked up when fake stories circulated that she’d be released before the end of her sentence. Comments on various social media sites are filled with hatred toward Yolanda, calling her a “fat bitch” and demanding that she never be released from prison. Yolanda’s defense attorney, Douglas Tinker, received a death threat during the course of the trial warning him not to tarnish Selena’s name. Valdez, the prosecuting attorney, also received a death threat to ensure he aggressively prosecuted Yolanda. Even I’m worried about receiving death threats because of this essay, 25 years after the case.

I understand the anger toward her. She committed a heinous crime and took a daughter and wife away from her family. But the pitch at which Latinx and Chicano people in particular have hated her for so long speaks to something deeper.

What is striking about our memory for this woman is that it fluctuates between disdain and invisibility. We remember her as a sociopath who committed an unforgivable crime against a young and generous soul, someone who was a friend to her and a star to us. We have also forgotten her for so long that some of us wonder if she’s dead. She’s not.

You don't have to be Yolanda to know what it’s like to be simultaneously forgotten and disdained. As recently as the last election, Latinos again were thrust into that intersection. White supremacy set a target on the Black Lives Matter movement, leaving Latinos, and the hundreds of detained migrant children still looking for their asylum-seeking parents lost by the U.S. immigration system, seemingly invisible in the national conversation about who will be the next president. But it was just in 2016 that Donald Trump conjured images of rapists, murderers and drug smugglers (men who look like my dad) breaking into the country to cause violence, necessitating a wall that Mexico would build. We disappear into the ether until we are summoned as a stand in for the boogeyman, the fanged monster threatening chaos.

Many of us believe these lies. Some Latinos, mainly Cuban-Americans, made headlines for their support for Trump this November, leading dozens of newsrooms scrambling to make sense of such a confusing contradiction. But many of us gave it the face of betrayal — Yolanda. In one widely circulated meme, Yolanda stands next to Selena speaking into a mic. Over Yolanda’s image, someone wrote “Latinos for Trump;” over Selena, they wrote “Latinos.” Twenty five years later, Yolanda is the face of deceit, even though some of us think she’s dead.

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There are parts of me I wish could disappear. Maybe the kid who sucked blood from cuts as a kid, who was bullied by a group of white ballerinas as a child, who taught her friends how to masturbate. Or maybe the teen who sometimes spent lunch alone in the high school library, who hung out with the burners and future queers, who anxiously picked out her hair until she had bald spots, who obsessively counted calories until she’d pass out in dressing rooms.

As much as I’ve willed these parts of me to disappear, they haven’t — and they won’t. Accepting that has meant coming to terms with the ways that I’ve felt like an outsider. It has meant knowing those painful moments when my own mother didn’t recognize me. It has meant knowing how it feels to suddenly find myself in a days-long depression, stewing in my own stink. It’s meant knowing how it feels to succumb to fiery heartbroken rage that left me wailing like a wounded animal in the streets. It has meant knowing times when I’ve fallen into sobs so heavy that it’s scared people who were afraid of recognizing pain in themselves. I’ve never killed anyone. But like Yolanda, I know what it’s like for people to be afraid of you. I know what it’s like to be afraid of yourself.

Gloria Anzaldúa first gave queer Latinx people the language to describe this torn and conflicting state of shame and rebellion through her 1987 book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. In it, she describes this contradictory psyche that haunts colonized people, particularly the queers and women among us, as a two-faced “shadow-beast.” One face of the shadow-beast represents repression, conformity and internalized hatred and shame around our sexuality, gender and color that aids in our continued colonization. The other face represents rebellion, liberation and self-sovereignty.

She writes that some of us push “the unacceptable parts” of ourselves into the shadows out of fear, while some become conscious of the shadow-beast. But others “try to waken the Shadow-Beast inside us” and a few are lucky to see tenderness, not a lustful serpent. She writes, “On its face we have uncovered the lie.”

What is the lie on Yolanda Saldivar’s face? What is it we see in her that makes us recoil? What myth do we continue through her?

At 34, the same age as Yolanda when she killed Selena, she’s no longer a monster to me. Yolanda is no longer among the demons I imagine hiding in dark shadows around my Brooklyn apartment. She’s no longer a venomous serpent. She has no fangs growing from her cheeks or glowing yellow pupils.

She looks a lot like me. She’s tall with bad posture because she’s still insecure about her height. She has short black curly hair that sometimes looks blue in the sunlight. She can be blunt and too direct, but she’s working on it. She calls her antidepressants her “crazy pills'' and takes them every night with a multivitamin. She spends a lot of time alone and keeps her friend circle small. She makes her parents laugh but still frustrates them with her willfulness. She’ll cut a bitch to defend her chihuahua, but cry over a harsh tone.

Yolanda doesn’t scare me anymore. She no longer scares me because I’m no longer afraid of myself.

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