Yolanda Saldívar Was Denied Parole. Now, Let’s Confront the Obsession That Drove Her to Kill Selena

On Thursday, Yolanda Saldívar was denied parole for killing Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, just three days before the 30th anniversary of the “Queen of Tejano's” death. Saldívar officially filed for parole earlier this year, hoping to earn her freedom. The petition came about a year after Saldívar was extensively interviewed in prison for Selena and Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them, an Oxygen exclusive docuseries about her relationship with Quintanilla, pegged as a tell-all but during which she failed to reveal anything new about the case. According to a family member of Saldívar, who describes her as a “political prisoner,” Selena’s murderer believes she has served her time and is ready to rejoin society — but continued backlash against her online indicates that the public is not sympathetic to her return. Upon hearing news about Saldívar’s parole review, Selena fans took to social media to express their discontent, many of them posting memes of them waiting for her outside of prison gates. When it was announced on March 27 that her parole was denied, more memes circulated of fans celebrating her denial, dancing, singing, drinking, and even making GRWM videos in commemoration.

Saldívar is certainly not a political prisoner — she committed a crime and is suffering the consequences of her actions — and her crime is a part of a larger culture of obsession that continues to be profitable to music execs, music streaming platforms, and social media platforms that thrive when their users are running on extreme emotions.

Obsessive and damaging fan behavior has been a feature of U.S. celebrity for decades. Fandoms have been intense and unwieldy since women started fainting at The Beatles concerts, but today, the Internet has escalated the communication within these communities, as well as expanded the industry around the personal lives of celebrities through social media posting as well as paparazzi photos. As celebrities and pop stars are encouraged to build parasocial relationships with their fans through social media posting of pseudo-personal content to maximize profit and attention, social media has also allowed fans to create communities where the personal lives of their idols are discussed and judged in detail. In these communities, many fans create a one-sided relationship with the idol at the center, creating fandom rivalries and sometimes mob behavior. 

Saldívar is, perhaps, an early adopter of this kind of relationship between fan and idol, where the celebrity becomes the center of the fan’s life. The success of Selena Quintanilla in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a new phenomena for the Latine community. Quintanilla was the first Latine artist to take a predominantly Spanish-language album to number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, opening the mainstream music industry for Latine music and artists more broadly. No matter how you frame it, Quintanilla was the community’s pop star, a singer-songwriter with a powerful voice, unique style, and the remarkable ability to cater to both Spanish-language and English-language music industries. She paved the way for other Latina pop stars to expand Latine genres into the global stage — arguably, the music industry would not have so many Latina pop stars if Quintanilla hadn’t done it first. It is undeniable that Quintanilla was an icon, a status that only intensified with her untimely violent death by the hands of her murderer Saldívar, one of the singer’s biggest fans. Saldívar’s crime is abhorrent — both in how she murdered Quintanilla and how she had gained her victim’s trust, as well as the trust of her family — and it’s essential to note that the murder of Quintanilla is an extreme ending to an all too common story when it comes to intense fandoms.

Quintanilla’s death was as sudden as it was shocking to the U.S. public. A 34-year-old former nurse from San Antonio who became a fan of the singer-songwriter after attending a live concert, it was Saldívar’s idea to start a fan club for Quintanilla — of which she was a founder and president — to promote the singer and sell merchandise in 1991. The fan club sold t-shirts, exclusive printed interviews, and let fans know about upcoming concerts. Saldívar signed up 8,000 people to the club in three years. The Quintanilla family trusted Saldívar and increasingly included her in the family business. In 1994, Saldívar was hired to manage two Selena Etc boutiques in Corpus Christi and San Antonio, and given access to the company’s bank accounts and credit cards, which she misused for her own benefits. Quintanilla fired Saldívar after she had been embezzling, and in a subsequent meeting at a motel to get financial documents from Saldívar, the former nurse shot Quintanilla to death, ending the pop star’s life as well as her own. 

Fandom culture in itself is a driver of the obsessive behavior she indulged in, and celebrities continue to be put into danger because of it. The most recent case of this is Chappell Roan’s run-in with her stalker, who the singer-songwriter says tried to befriend her family and friends to get closer to her — which is exactly what Saldívar did to get close to Quintanilla and her family. When Roan took to her social media accounts to set down some boundaries, she received backlash from people who claimed she isn’t built for fame. It’s implicit that many fans believe their idols owe them something — be that an interaction, a concert performance, or a hug — when in reality, celebrities are just people, made of flesh, blood and fragile life, as Saldívar herself found out. 

There are very few studies that quantify the size and strength of fandom communities, but it’s safe to say that parasocial fandoms have only grown since Quintanilla’s murder. Quintanilla herself, even posthumously, still has a huge fanbase who post content about her and rally around her murder. Saldívar herself has used this fanbase to profit off her own crime in the aforementioned Selena and Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them docu-series. The teasing of new information about Selena is enticing to any fan or casual listener who wants to know more about the singer and the fatal day of her murder — even if Saldívar meant this as rage-bait, the fact that Selena’s name can still used for profit is a feature, not a bug, of celebrity culture more broadly. 

On the flip side, modern fandoms are where many people find community. According to a recent study from Amazon Ads, 70 % of fans say their fandom and its community are part of their everyday life, with nearly 4 out of 5 fans surveyed saying they discovered their passion through others like family or friends. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does demonstrate how strong this kind of culture is, and why there’s no interest in the market to set boundaries around fandom cultures. The more intense the obsession is, the more money that particular fandom will pay to support their favorite artist — and we wouldn’t want profits to be affected. 

As a woman who killed a woman who was universally beloved, Saldívar is easy to hate and to make fun of. This is all understandable, especially considering how Saldívar has recently blamed Selena for her own murder. But it doesn’t really address the underlying issue of a music industry that is widely dependent on and encourages the intensity of fandom culture. It only punishes dangerous obsession in its fatal extreme. 

Selena should have had the right to be an artist safely, without the danger of a fan getting too close, embezzling money from her business, and eventually murdering her in a rage. Saldívar spearheaded a fan club that directly supported Quintanilla’s artistic endeavors — her obsessive behavior was profitable until it became fatal. If music-making — and art-making in general — was less dependent on popularity and mass appeal, fandom cultures could be more contained, and we could treat celebrities like the humans they actually are.