Op-Ed O Algo: Why A Sonorous Selena Quintanilla Keeps Me All-Ears Today or: Debra Castanedo Finds A Way

Written by Mateo Hurtado

NYU MA Performance Studies 2020

Co-founder of the Brown Theatre Collective

@_laserpipe, Instagram & Twitter

"Selena on March 15th, 1995
El Dorado Night Ranch Club
Houston,Texas" - photo via ReBloggy.com

What’s on the west side of a story? In the face, in the palm of the hand that belongs to Time proper, when you lose a loved one - a phrase such as “but a few short months ago” loses its meaning. At the apex of loss and a worldwide pandemic, nothing short of rupture, fractured healing, at the very least, a wail, is bound to be released into the universe. Staying put whilst in shelter-in-place at the epicenter of the epidemic, out of all sources of expression, a link posted by Latinx alt/pop culture website Remezcla upended my all too often encapsulated state-of-familial-mourning. 

For a splash more of paths into the inner workings of my imagination currently, the gears of my brain are rotating vigorously meditating about the lasting impact of Rosita Dolores Alverio; Rosita being the lesser known name of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony award winning icon Rita Moreno. A few days ago this very Remezcla article cited songs by another arguably equally enticing, dazzling, monumental and timeless sonic force: Selena Quintanilla. On cue with its Millennial audience/s, the Remezcla article is apt and succinct with its clickbait title, “10 Selena Deep Cuts to Keep You Entertained During Social Distancing”, however, one of the tracks listed rocked my world by tying together the Tejana vocal powerhouse with the effervescent self-anointed spitfire Rita Moreno. The article states that one of the final tracks Quintanilla ever recorded was a cover of “A Boy Like That”, a well-known track from the motion picture West Side Story with Rita Moreno at the helm of the number in 1961. 

As a MexiRican, or do I throw in the hyphen here, Mexi-Rican, joven from Chicago who feels compelled to tell stories; do I grasp onto the poetry of being raised on the glam that Selena left us? By glam, of course, I mean the glamorous sequins, skintight leather, chusma-friendly loud red lipstick, stylized sonorous seismic echoes of Selena that still reverberate almost equally in my memory in concert with the fragments of moments with the lasting memory of my late-great-tia Debra Castanedo. We called her Peta, and in my listening of this quintessential Broadway cinematic musical treasure, this action, this verb, this duty of calling could not be more illuminating. 

Zapping and transmitting throughout the web, or at the very least during my insomniac-fueled searches on YouTube, videos still remain of 2000’s along with 2010’s pop artists talking about what our universe might be like if Selena were still around in a physical sense. Of course the ephemera of her memory and her bold, unparalleled legacy is brash, sexualized, gendered, rendered, marked, beloved, beautiful, and still unforgotten. But what might it mean for her to take on, take up, take flight with a song that the then-emerging-performer getting used to her stage and screen name, Rita Moreno, was able to propel this ballad into 20th century cinema history opposite Natalie Wood? 

Mind you, I certainly was but a toddler during all of this star studded hoopla with charity, recording, and Moreno-homages were the least relevant at the time to my toddler pedigree back in Chicago. Yet as a young lad, almost unanimously, the women in my family, Peta included, cherished Selena and without missing a beat showed the classic film of her life starring J-Lo to me, the film being shown at home on VHS of course. The grainy texture worth mentioning from the tape is less of an interesting detail here since mathematically speaking the tape would have needed more time to be so worn out for it to appear that way; I’ll skip the often rehearsed description of what cassettes felt like playing what felt like on-loop on televisions at home amongst families. The fact is, before Selena’s life was lifted from all of us into the ether, she had one cacophony that she was more than ready to share, more than ready to step into only in the way she could- with her voice. 

When I pressed play on the YouTube link, I was immediately unsettled. Usually with the gravitas of West Side Story, the strings do so much work with their intensity, their simplicity, yet Selena’s arrangement of this track blares with Janet Jackson-esque overtones at the production level. At a textbook new jack swing amplitude, this “A Boy Like That”  tickles with subtle xylophones, heavy drums produced by the Roland TR-808 drum machine, and polyphonic echos, high notes helmed by Quintanilla. In the rendition from 1961, this duet with Wood and Moreno has its fair share of crescendos especially given the nature of Stephen Sondheim’s composition in this dire, drastic contemporary retelling of Romeo & Juliet with seldom hope for Maria or Anita’s livelihood in the final twenty minutes of the film. Offering a bit more than an entire minute extra of music to the original, Selena fills in the soundtrack with a Spanish translation of the lyrics throughout yet spliced with the original English words, too. Tantalizing with its tempo, is this magnificent deliberate attention to detail, craft, style accredited enough to Selena and Selena alone?

Refusing a comparative narrative that might pit or purport the aesthetic flourishes accomplished by Moreno and Quintanilla on their own, I instead want to place each sonic iteration that are decades apart a bit closer into conversation. 

Moving, grooving, bumping, scathing, hotter-than-hot these days are the aspirational, representation-heavy longings within Performance for a fixed way of being in a mainstream sphere. Seeing oneself or being seen is oft a dominant goal for media-makers and tellers of stories offscreen predominantly in an/the audience. I too find myself tangled in this rolodex of complicated identity politics-driven questions about the importance of heritage, culture, difference, memory of ancestors, representation, sans selling out after all. However! As a MexiRican teller of stories, wow, okay, again this moniker is weird; some other attempt might work. As a Boricua-Mexican first generation Chicago who possibly paradoxically has a criollo last name: Hurtado, what if the difficult-to-embellish with any adjective, Selena, sounds out with each distinct clamor, another way to perform in the world? 

Reeling back to my split second anecdote of meandering through testimonies online, music icons who we now frequently laud, worship, decorate with awards from time and time again including but not limited to Beyonce, Lady Gaga, or even the late Amy Winehouse - would be in great company if Selena stormed, made a sensation of herself in present day. At around the 2:30 mark, Selena proclaims “Very smart, Maria, very smart-” and echoes then belts the word “smart” into some other plane. Dipping, darting into Espanol with ease, Quintanilla precision still accomplishes the original essence of the intoxicated frazzled tension from West Side Story - yet the intensity is still significantly placed into explosive sonic territory. Persistent with percussion, how does Selena get away with both a louder than conceivably possible notes in a song that is musical-theatre-canon without a trace? 

Flashing forward, as I still sit here in awe at the inimitable work accomplished by Selena in this track, I can’t help but wonder about the other historical markers that remain pointed, acute in a non-linear, striking way. 2020, this very year both marks the 25th anniversary of Selena Quintanilla’s death and the year that Stephen Spielberg’s new adaptation of West Side Story returns to theaters this December. Pulsating with as much energy as a fresh glass of OJ with traces of pulp is Rita Moreno who has a supporting role in the Spielberg steered flick; yet Moreno’s iconic stature and status allows her agency offscreen, too. Billed as an executive producer of the film, still, what do we do with these chords, these solo-choral exclamations, dual in form as delectable and detested? But, by destested in this instance, I mean by the content not the form. Anita’s prying and push to what we might now call “cancelling” Tony is profusely evident in the vocal power that Selena offers, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly in this thought experiment write up. 

        It appears to me now that the actions calling along with another that I add now, returning, are partners in crime within this nefarious insurgence of subversive sound soldados; Moreno, Quintanilla, Castanedo. Castanedo’s distinctly butch legacy lightly yet lightning bright with its presence in my family made sure that soul, blues, and any riotous-party-friendly spanish music with enough bass heard until sunrise for her heart’s content remained ultra present. What might Selena have been calling us in 2020 to do? What was Selena returning to in the recording studio layering lyrics of what probably felt like the yesteryear into the then tail end of the 20th century on the precipice of a new millenium? Far from lost or forgotten, this casting that I am insisting upon could certainly frame Rita Moreno as a nucleus only beginning her polygenesis yet again, by which I deploy via the less frequently enacted definition “the hypothetical origination of language or of a surname from a number of independent sources in different places at different times.”. This Rita Moreno that we think we know as a public figure who takes hyperbole to new heights with her hues, gradients of loud medals and accolades flying over the mainstream’s radar with sorrow, may be an era on its way out. Meanwhile this difficult, in a different way, to mark, to grasp, to find the words for, this legacy of Castanedo who I ought to simply name as Peta for my sanity here. Her strength that in turn consistently teaches me to simply be? That piercing profound legacy that pops as much as any Selena track from her discography, any astute ballad bellowed by Moreno, is something more than worth tuning into, all-ears.