Something Everyone Could Agree On

We were from the same stock. We knew about pozole, mesquite, the sea breeze, the taste of salt water, sunburns, acedia, ennui. Our families had been farmworkers, machine shop workers, pickers and packers of fruits and vegetables. We saw the same large spiders. We knew of snakes in the brushland; we knew about barbecues and sausage in tortillas, and Coca-Cola, and migas with eggs, about brains and eyeballs in barbacoa, about the tart and spicy taste of nopales with Pace picante sauce, about double pepperoni pizzas. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers rode in mule-drawn carts and knew men with burlap sacks. We knew hailstorms, green skies, tornado warnings. We knew about lowrider cars, white roses, the smell of the sea as it crashed against the riprap of a jetty, the sting of a jellyfish, the boredom of the Mexico we’d never known. We knew the inviting lilt of the bajo sexto, the cool, suave chords of old boleros, the pulse of life and the taquachito. It is what our parents danced to before we were born; it was a continuance of some 350 years of dancing in the New World, and we could still hear those mestizo rhythms, as children, as adults, as adolescents dazzled by smoke machines and B-roll footage and colored lights and MTV. We heard cumbias. We heard huapangos. We wanted an escape from the compromise, made without our consent, to exist under a high sun, to sweat in the night, to smell cut grass and turbid water and know a South Texas that had and had not been ours all along. We knew Fito Olivares, “Juana la Cubana,” Grupo Mazz, Donna Summer, the Starland Vocal Band, Jimmy González, football, potato salad, horseflies, the San Antonio River Walk, Little Joe y La Família, “The Hustle,” Barbie, suffering, death, and Ann Richards. Though we never met for more than a few seconds, one hot summer day in the summer of 1993, she was a part of me, and I was a part of her.

When Selena Quintanilla-Pérez died, on March 31, 1995, I was a chubby ten-year-old boy in the fifth grade. I lived in Harlingen, Texas, about forty-five minutes from Brownsville, Texas, and about an hour from the US-Mexico border. It rained all day that day. A bewildered teacher’s assistant came around 2 p.m. and told us to switch on the radio. The singer who had dazzled thousands of people in Houston just a month before had bled out on the lobby floor of a Days Inn in Corpus Christi. Many thought it was a cruel April Fools’ joke. The rumors were wild: people wondered whether Selena had...