In the decades since her murder in 1995, Selena Quintanilla has variously been memorialized with a biopic, a docu-series, and a novel in verse exploring her far-reaching legacy. In Netflix’s new documentary Selena Y Los Dinos, however, a side of the Mexican-American musician that has rarely (if ever) been seen before takes center stage, as director Isabel Castro devotes the bulk of her thoughtful and loving film to exploring Quintanilla’s family life and dreams for her future before her life was tragically cut short.
On the morning of Selena Y Los Dinos’s release, Vogue spoke to Castro about getting to know the Quintanilla family, centering Selena’s love of fashion, and the “Como La Flor” performance that always makes her cry.
Vogue: How does it feel to finally see your film out in the world?
Isabel Castro: It’s so surreal and overwhelming, and honestly makes me want to cry every time I think about it. It’s just been so moving seeing people’s reaction videos; I’ve been lying down on the couch all day, compulsively watching all the videos people are posting. It’s very exciting.
What sparked the idea to make a documentary about Selena Quintanilla and her family?
I made a film called Mija that premiered at Sundance in 2022 and tells the story of two Latina women who are trying to make it in the music industry, and simultaneously and kind of cosmically, the Quintanilla family had decided that they were ready to share their archive and tell their story. We were interested in making a documentary, and they had been looking for a director for some time. As a Latina, my work deals a lot with issues around identity and the Latino struggle in the United States, and the family saw my body of work and realized I might be a good fit.
I grew up with Selena. I’m a Mexican immigrant who grew up in a very white community, and never felt totally like I belonged exactly to one culture or another. When I saw the film Selena when I was younger, it really sparked something in me and kind of made me feel proud of being someone who occupied two worlds. Selena really taught me to be unapologetic about that. There’s this great scene in the documentary where she’s kind of tripping over her Spanish, and I just related to that so personally. When I was reached out to about this opportunity, I obviously lost my mind; we went down to Corpus Christi [Texas] to meet the family, and the rest is history, so to speak.
What was it like getting to know the Quintanilla family?
Initially I was overwhelmed and scared, in the way that you would be scared to meet a celebrity. I have such reverence for them that it was daunting to meet them in person. But over the course of two years, me and my producer would go back and forth to Corpus Christi to digitize all the archives. We spent a total of six months in Corpus Christi, so we really got to spend time with the family, and they went from being this incredibly legendary family that is symbolic of so much power in the Latino community to a family that I got to know on a deeply personal level. I was kind of surprised by how personable and humble and generous and warm they were.
What did you learn about Selena that surprised you the most in the making of this film?
I think I went into this process with a connection to Selena as a symbol, and I came away rom it with a relationship to Selena as a young girl. I think the thing that was most surprising to me was her youth; because I looked up to her for so much of my life, and because she has become so symbolically significant, I think we forget how young she was. She died when she was 23, and now, at 35, I look at her and can’t believe how much sheer power she had from such a young age. That innate power kind of comes off the screen from when she’s eight years old and a camera is first turned on her. You feel her sheer power and charisma, and that kind of caught me off-guard.
I loved the film’s focus on Selena’s dreams of designing clothing and opening a store. What kind of research did you do to highlight that information?
In the film, the sketches that you see are sketches from Selena’s notebook. Selena’s design of her outfits is a really big topic in the film, because it was so deeply important to her. Her passion was clothing and design, and so we really wanted to spotlight it. It’s kind of unbelievable, the stylistic range of outfits she had. They felt so pioneering and ahead of their time, and she was never afraid to take risks in terms of the patterns and cuts of things that she wore. She wore brassieres, but then she also wore really big suits and chaps, and she just took inspiration from all these different kinds of cultural facets of her life that were reflected both in the footage and in the photographs. At the Selena Museum in Corpus Christi, they have all of her outfits on display, and every time that we would go to Q Productions, I would take a look at those and just be so impressed by how much vision she had for style and fashion.
I really respected your choice not to focus much of the film on Selena’s tragic death. Can you tell me a little bit about your thinking?
From the start, I was very clear about the fact that her death was not that interesting to me. I think it’s kind of a senseless tragedy that people fixate on, and it’s really nothing more than that. To focus on it too much would be to detract from the overwhelming scale of what she accomplished in her life. I really wanted to find a way to explain what happened and kind of get through what happened in the most efficient way from a narrative perspective, because I think it’s also important as a way to explain the grief that her family now carries and the ways in which her legacy has continued. It was a big narrative challenge to try to figure out how to do that, but me and the editor and the producers were all on the same page, and the family was really appreciative of that.
What’s your favorite Selena song?
My favorite Selena song is “Como La Flor.” There’s a part of the film where she sings it at the Astrodome, and it’s a close-up on her face, and that performance of the song always brings me to tears. I just love it.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
