Abraham Quintanilla was more than Selena's overprotective father, this close friend says

Abraham Quintanilla, the father of the singer Selena, passed away this past December at the age of 86. Quintanilla was a controversial figure. He sensed early on that his daughter had the potential to be a star, and pushed Selena and her siblings hard to achieve what he saw as their full potential.

Over the years, in movie adaptations of Selena’s tragic story, Quintanilla has been portrayed as domineering, controlling, and inflexible. But our next guess says that’s not the whole story.

Hector Saldaña is the music curator of the Wittliff Collection at Texas State University, and he’s also a longtime music journalist. Back in the early-90s, Saldaña got to know Quintanilla well through his reporting on Selena’s meteoric rise — and her shocking murder. He and Quintanilla kept talking after those initial stories.

Saldaña says Quintanilla wasn’t just a source, he was a friend.

He also says that while a lot of the harsher stories about Quintanilla have some truth to them, they don’t reveal the full picture of the man Saldaña knew. Quintanilla, Saldaña told me, was a loving father and a passionate musician in his own right.

Full conversation

HECTOR SALDAÑA: You know, his group in the 1950s was the original Dinos. They were an English singing group trying to emulate the sounds on the radio. They later switched and sang in Spanish. They were pioneers in that sense. If you did not have this American Chicano kid in love with Elvis and the rock ’n’ roll of that original era, there would never have been a Selena.

And I think he lived his dream through his daughter.

SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, well, it is interesting to me, that little detail that his band was called — as you were just saying — when he was a young man, the Dinos. And the family band that he later put together was, if I’m not mistaken, Selena and the Dinos. So he kept the name.

SALDAÑA: Yeah, Los Dinos, to give it a little more Latin flair. And it’s almost like a Mexican American Partridge Family trying to emerge out of Corpus Christi.

DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, since I imagine there’s gonna be some people listening to this who know who Selena is, maybe even love her music, maybe they’ve seen one of the biopics. But even if that’s the case, they may have this perception of Abraham Quintanilla as a certain kind of — in terms of the way he was portrayed — manipulative patriarchal figure.

[CLIP FROM THE 1995 MOVIE “SELENA” PLAYS]

What can you tell us to introduce us to maybe a little bit more nuanced version of him? I know that it’s not that he was not hard-edged in some ways, but I get the sense from what you’re saying that there was more to it than that.

SALDAÑA: There was more to it than that. He could be stern and very protective. But also, when Selena, who later became the queen of Tejano music, when they first started out, it really was a building program. It had such humble beginnings in playing the lousiest kind of gigs and just trying to cobble it together on a shoestring budget.

And then as she sort of emerged, she was not a novelty act, but it was novel in the Tejano genre to have such a young person, to have a female in this male dominated music form. And so, I’m a father myself, so he was protective of his daughters. And I think you could really get him to open up when he talked about his days with his original Dinos, that I think that all those sort of, you know, didn’t quite reach the brass ring with that band, that he wanted to try to get it right this time.

DINGMAN: And I mean, was there ever a sense that he and Selena had a bad relationship?

SALDAÑA: No, not really. We really need to look at Abraham Quintanilla in the way that we look at someone like Joe Jackson of the Jackson family; or Pop Staples even; or even Murray Wilson, the father of the Wilson brothers and the Beach Boys — you know, this sort of protective overlay and influential. Because Selena as a young girl is being influenced by Madonna, by Donna Summers, by Janet Jackson very much.

But yet, you know, if you think of Abraham as sort of old-school musician, and I think it’s that chemistry — in other words, the youthful energy that Selena brought and the natural talent and also in that new generation vibe with a little bit of what Pop was telling her, you know what I’m saying? I mean, I think it went hand in hand.

DINGMAN: I’m imagining the first time you talked to him, just like the first time you talk to any source, you feel like they’re kind of saying what they got in touch with this journalist to say. But obviously, ideally, over time you get to a point where you can talk to them like they’re real selves, or at least something close to it.

Did you ever have a moment in your conversations with Abraham where you felt like you got there, where he answered a question or said something to you, and you thought to yourself, “That’s the real guy”?

SALDAÑA: One incident that comes into mind in particular, in the mid-1990s, Showtime the network had launched a series called the “Latino Laugh Festival,” and it debuted and was taped in front of live audiences in San Antonio at various venues. This was about 1996 and ’97. It carried on for about three years in that original format with people like George Lopez and Daisy Fuentes and the notorious Carlos Mencia.

Well, Carlos Mencia made a tasteless joke about Selena on stage. I was in the theater, and so was Abraham. And I saw this bear of a man get up and start to head toward the doors, and you see Mencia leave, exiting. And I tried to follow as best I could. And, I mean, I was thinking, “This guy’s gonna wring his neck.” And the scuttlebutt was that Carlos was kind of hiding out.

DINGMAN: Well, and I have to think if that Showtime series you were just mentioning was airing in, like, ’96 or ’97 — that would have been very soon after Selena’s murder.

SALDAÑA: Yeah, it’s too soon. That wound was very real. And also, Abraham confided to me more than once that he blamed himself for being protective at the wrong time, that he was not protective when it mattered.

DINGMAN: What was behind that? How did he explain that to you?

SALDAÑA: Well, he recognized in himself that sometimes he was very overprotective, but he just felt that he just did not see the danger that lurked with Yolanda Saldívar, her murderer.

DINGMAN: And let me just say, for listeners who aren’t aware, Yolanda had been the president of Selena’s fan club.

SALDAÑA: Yes. So he hired her. Selena, at the time of her death you have to understand, she was chasing her dreams with fashion. You know, there was a couple of stores that carried her fashion line. Her father wasn’t too hip to that. Yolanda was brought in to kind of oversee a little bit of that.

That’s what happened. She was part of the fan club, but then she was brought in to oversee the clothing line.

DINGMAN: Right.

SALDAÑA: And so right away, other people around Selena noticed the bad vibes from this woman, but somehow the father didn’t.

DINGMAN: Yeah, well, and I have to imagine that must have been so complicated for Abraham, because I know there’s the famous story of how he reacted when he found that Selena had been dating her bandmate. He didn’t even want them to hold hands, and they famously had to elope without his knowledge in order to get married.

So is that what he was referring to? That he felt like once she had passed away, he had sort of been protective in the wrong ways?

SALDAÑA: Well, protective since they were children, you know what I’m saying? I mean, that reputation was not something that he hadn’t earned. He was a protective father. He was old school. Just in the way it turned out, that they were so close. They had achieved a big part of that dream.

And then to just have it snuffed out by something that was really there lurking almost in plain sight. It’s very painful. I mean, it’s painful for me to even remember that and think about that and contemplate that.