Selena Quintanilla was born in Lake Jackson in 1971, and after her father's restaurant failed in the early 1980s the family settled in Corpus Christi, where he managed the new family band, Selena y Los Dinos. They played street corners, weddings, quinceañeras and fairs. In the 1980s she was often criticized and refused bookings across Texas for singing Tejano, a male-dominated genre; from 1987 she won the Tejano Music Award for female vocalist nine years running. Her live album of 1993 won the Grammy for best Mexican-American album, the first by a woman in Tejano to do so, and Amor Prohibido in 1994 became one of the best-selling Latin albums in the United States. Critics credit her with Tejano's first broadly marketable era.
On March 31, 1995, she was shot and killed in Corpus Christi by Yolanda Saldívar, her friend and the former manager of her Selena Etc. boutiques. She was twenty-three. Two weeks later Governor George W. Bush declared her birthday, April 16, Selena Day in Texas.
The memorial, Mirador de la Flor, the Overlook of the Flower, was dedicated on May 25, 1997, on the Peoples Street T-Head along Shoreline Boulevard. A memorial plaque faces the boulevard, and white roses, said to have been her favorite, are the motif; Como la Flor was one of her signature songs. About 30,000 people visit each year. A stainless steel barrier added in 2000 protects the memorial from graffiti. She is buried at Seaside Memorial Park, a few miles south.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour