The Mexicans Are at It Again Meme

Selena Quintanilla's Legacy in Memes

Creators on social media remember Selena Quintanilla using memes and digitally-altered photos of the Tex-Mex icon.

Mexican-American music icon Selena Quintanilla has been gone for more than a quarter century, but she's still living life to the fullest online thanks to dedicated fans on social media. Most 26 years later her tragic murder in 1995, the Recording University recognized Selena with a Lifetime Achievement Award during the 63rd Almanac GRAMMY Awards on March fourteen. While the award looks dorsum at what Selena achieved in her short lifetime, fans accept helped Selena release new albums, speak out for social causes and even age gracefully thanks to memes and Photoshopped images shared on social media platforms unimaginable when she was alive.

A new podcast from WBUR and Futuro Studios called Annihilation for Selena takes a securely-reported but also personal look into Selena's legacy, including an entire episode on how the icon is remembered online. Equally host Maria Garcia puts it in an episode called "Selena and the Internet," the Selena web is "a place with its own rules, its own norms, its own culture. It's a textured place worth studying." Breaking down "the Selena web" into 8 categories, Garcia explains what the meme-ification of Selena shows us about the vocalizer's lasting entreatment and attempts to brand sense of the void she left behind.

Along with interviews with Selena's notoriously guarded father, Abraham Quintanilla, and featuring rare archive tape, Anything for Selena weaves the story of the singer's rising to icon status with host Maria Garcia's intimate story of finding her identify in the world as a offset-generation Mexican-American fronteriza. Garcia shows us how Selena'due south music, beloved interviews and the 1997 Selena biopic starring a young Jennifer Lopez have become the inexhaustible source textile of memes and digital content on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter.

ane. Selena and Yolanda

A photograph of Selena and her murderer Yolanda Saldívar has been remixed again and again to depict the boxing of "skillful versus evil" in the eyes of meme creators.

A bittersweet meme for fans, this is the meme that keeps on giving. A picture show of Selena with Yolanda Saldívar, the friend and fan society manager responsible for her murder, has become a standard template for many Selena memes. The stark blackness-and-white dissimilarity provides the perfect backdrop for communicating anything meme creators run across as a battle between proficient and evil, from "my plans" and the twelvemonth 2020 to Latinos and Latino Trump supporters.

In this meme, Selena is a stand up-in for Texans and Gov. Greg Abbott is represented by Selena's murderer. The meme circulated shortly after Abbott lifted the state's mask mandate and ordered Texas to open completely despite the ongoing public health crisis.

Far from just a funny (if too foreboding) meme, the continual remixing of this format to speak to issues of the day is a testament to fans' enduring devotion to the vocalizer. Memes in this format are often political, despite Selena'due south well-documented reticence in life to discuss her political views (she was a devout Jehovah'due south Witness).

Another take on the popular format. Hither, the meme is a commentary on the high pct of Cuban-Americans in Florida who voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

That fact hasn't stopped fans on the correct and left from claiming her to their side, vying for the validation that would come with Selena'south blessing and cultural clout. These memes too reveal how palpable contempt for Saldívar remains among Selena's fans. Imprisoned in 1995 and eligible for parole in 2025, she frequently features elsewhere on "the Selena internet" every bit the eternal villain, portrayed alongside Latinx mythical monsters and demons similar El Cucuy and La Llorona.

ii. Social justice memes

A scene from the 1997 Selena biopic starring Jennifer Lopez is remixed with a social justice message.

Selena'due south image has as well been mobilized for social causes, both online and in existent life. Held up in life and death equally a part model and vanguard for Latinx representation and visibility, Selena'southward image and music has been recruited by social justice causes similar Selena for Sanctuary, a benefit concert series to raise funds for immigrant advancement. In Annihilation for Selena, host Maria Garcia ponders this impulse to connect Selena to today's social movements, wondering, "Would she have spoken up for Black Lives Affair? In defense of kids in cages?" While we'll never know, that hasn't prevented meme creators from imagining that she would.

One of the most-quoted lines from the 1997 motion-picture show was inspiration for this meme.

This is best illustrated by Selena memes that went viral on Instagram in summertime 2020 on the now-defunct account SelenaYLosDichos. In an interview, co-creator Vicente Garcia said he was inspired to link Selena to social justice afterward the George Floyd protests meant he and others were fighting against racial justice and law brutality all during a pandemic. "Information technology'due south exhausting," he said, paralleling one of the most-quoted lines from the 1997 Selena biopic in which Selena's father Abraham says, "We accept to be more than Mexican than the Mexicans, more American than the Americans, both at the same time. Information technology'south exhausting!"

three. Remixing erstwhile photos

Fans frequently take portraits from classic Selena photoshoots and re-imagine them equally artwork for imaginary new albums.

While some of the biggest Selena fan accounts on platforms like Instagram strive to serve more every bit digital archives of every Selena photo ever taken, others take information technology upon themselves to remix quondam content. Given that Selena lived just 23 years, and was a beloved, well-documented public figure for less than one-half of that time, Selena fans contend with the fact that at some bespeak they volition have seen every photoshoot, every interview, every advertising, and every music video blooper. Thankfully, given the vocaliser's timelessness and the fact that a new generation of fans is discovering her online and passed down through their OG-Selena-fan parents like cultural heritage, new content is always cropping up.

A Selena photograph edited to take the vocalist from Texas to Paris.

Remixed once more and once more from bachelor source textile from the 80s and 90s, Photoshop-assisted memes help fans imagine alternative album covers (some with explicit content labels!) and concert appearances in international destinations Selena never had the take chances to see.

4. Selena memes that imagine, "what if?"

Here, Selena is on the cover of an imaginary issue of People, reflecting on her career "ten years later on her retirement."

Selena imagined at the 2019 Billboard Music Festival with a mod hairstyle.

Perhaps the memes and images that take the about dedication are also the ones that are most poignant and heart-wrenching. This category of Selena internet content attempts to fill the void Selena left backside, and lets fans imagine what should have been. From Photoshopping Selena into a graying viejitalooking back at her career on an imaginary encompass of People, to editing photos of Selena and her married man Chris Perez with the family they didn't get to take, this category takes the about skill to create—and the most center. Others, however, have taken a more light-hearted approach, like these Tweets that predict a world where Selena was never taken away before her time would be a utopia complete with flying cars and futuristic cities.

Want to learn more about the other iv major categories of Selena memes? Check out Anything for Selena out now on Apple tree Podcasts.

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Source: https://www.wbur.org/anythingforselena/2021/03/15/selenas-legacy-in-memes

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