There’s a New Selena y Los Dinos Documentary. Do We Need It?

I was skeptical going into the Sundance Film Festival premiere of Selena y Los Dinos, the new documentary about Selena Quintanilla directed by Isabel Castro (who also made Mija) in collaboration with the surviving Quintanilla family. At what point is it no longer about honoring the singer’s memory but profiting off Selena’s brief life?

We’ve had so much posthumous content from the family’s Q Productions: the iconic 1997 movie Selena and Netflix's underresourced 2020 Selena: The Series, two albums, makeup lines, clothing collections, festivals — and those are the things that actually happened. They even attempted to put together a hologram tour, wanting her ghost to perform for us filtered through their computers.

The thing is that practically anything branded Selena sells. But just because it sells doesn’t mean it’s right. Our community loves her, and we’ll catapult a cheaply made Netflix series that failed to capture Selena’s magnetism to the top of the charts. As fans push back on the commodification of Selena’s memory, we’re still buying the stuff, even when it seems in poor taste (looking at Lifetime’s Selena & Yolanda: Secrets Between Them).

This is the oversaturated landscape that Selena y Los Dinos enters into. The film is mostly archival footage, supported by interviews with the Quintanilla family, band members, a few industry partners, and thankfully, Selena’s husband and bandmate Chris Pérez.

While some of this footage is “never before seen,” there’s really not much new here. The doc follows the Quintanillas’ well-worn path. We hear again how Selena got her name and how father Abraham Quintanilla noticed her voice and decided to fulfill his musician dreams through his children. We see her rise to fame, learn Spanish, win her Grammy, and more. There’s the iconic performance footage going from Selena as a little girl in her family’s restaurant to her in the purple jumper at the Houston Astrodome. There’s an expert montage of Selena pulling men on stage for “Qué Creías.” And there are plenty of shots of her and the band performing in the cow-print costumes.

But there are some candid family moments. In the Q&A after the premiere, sister Suzette Quintanilla shared that she shot most of the videos, capturing how everyone felt after a show, when the costumes, makeup, and hairpieces came out. There’s clearly a lot of love and camaraderie. But, again, we know this. 

While it’s a familiar path, Selena y Los Dinos benefits from its closeness to its subject. There are no actresses playing Selena. There are no extrapolated “new” songs pieced together from her existing body of work. There’s just Selena: her voice in interviews, her old journals, and her smile. And there’s power in seeing her actual face, of looking at her actual body. With the scripted productions, it was easy to fall for the whitewashing, with thinner, lighter actresses donning the bustiers. But not here.

The result feels political. Selena didn’t just embody a working-class, borderland aesthetic — she pushed it forward. That’s why we’re all still copying her red lipstick and big hoops. It’s a declaration that our tastes, our culture, and our people matter.

At the premiere, executive producer Suzette declared that watching the film made her feel proud, as a woman and especially as a Mexican American. Our community is under siege, so perhaps it’s good to have this shared totem in Selena, this figure that engenders pride and refuses to be made smaller.

The film also made me reflect on where we are when it comes to identity and language. Today, we have Bad Bunny, his Puerto Rico residency, and his refusal to center English-speaking audiences. Back in Selena’s time, the goal was always to crossover, to make that English-language album. This makes sense for her; English was her first language. But even as she kept that as a north star, she and her family also respected and learned from their Mexican audiences. 

In the film, there’s this powerful moment when we see Selena y Los Dinos perform in Mexico. They don’t exactly bomb, but they don’t connect either. The audience is polite but confused. Brother, songwriter, and executive producer A.B. Quintanilla shares that they weren’t ready for that audience at that time. But then they learn. They bring on band members who speak Spanish. They became interested in cumbia and other popular Mexican art forms. But, as the documentary emphasizes, they don’t just replicate what Mexican artists were doing. Selena and her family make it their own, mixing influences from both sides of the border like only we “ni de aquí, ni de allá” folks can do. That’s Chicano culture. And there’s no denying that Selena y Los Dinos shaped how my generation, and the ones that came after us, define ourselves. 

It’s tempting to try to define Selena by the tragedy that befell her. Selena y Los Dinos thankfully rejects that. I don’t think the words “Yolanda Salazar” are uttered once in it. And when an audience member tried to ask about the woman who stole the artist’s life at the premiere, the moderator shut him down. Yes, the film covers the day of her death and the family’s reactions, but then it moves on to how people mourned her, focusing on the singer’s legacy and impact, rather than the terrible facts of that day.

It’s affirming to have Selena y Los Dinos offer this view into her life, to see a documentary get so close to her, both as a person and a performer.

We don’t know what Selena’s place in the culture would be today if she had lived. She didn’t. And while there are products that bear her name that feel exploitative, this documentary does not. In it, it’s easy to feel the Mexican tradition of remembering our dead, of believing that only when someone is no longer remembered are they truly gone.