The new Netflix documentary Selena y Los Dinos tells an inspirational story of a hard-working family band’s ascent from playing tiny restaurant back rooms to selling out the Houston Astrodome. It’s also difficult to watch without wondering what Selena Quintanilla, the preternaturally gifted lead singer of Los Dinos, might be doing now had she not been killed in 1995 at the age of 23. How many more Grammys would she have under her belt? Would she have moved into films, shooting them in between albums? Would she have a clothing line at Fashion Week, or financially fruitful Target collabs? Would she be touring with her own children, or even grandchildren, just as her parents toured with her?
To tell the story of Selena and her family, Emmy-nominated director Isabel Castro (Mija) sifted through family archives and previously unseen footage from the Quintanillas’ private home videos. Castro also conducted candid interviews with Selena’s parents, Marcella and Abraham; her sister and drummer, Suzette; her bassist-songwriter brother, A.B.; and her guitarist husband, Chris Pérez.
Suzette is now the steward of Q Productions, the Quintanilla family’s hometown HQ. For this project, she wanted to find a director who could sift through the family’s massive archive to tell a story that would resonate with the generations of fans who still make the pilgrimage to visit the Selena Museum in Corpus Christi, Texas, and wider audiences as well. Castro is a lifelong fan herself who found she had “really great chemistry” with Suzette in their first Zoom conversation. For Suzette, the vibe was mutual. “She reminded me of home, like I’d known her for a long time,” she says of Castro. “Before we hung up on the call, I texted my lawyer, ‘She’s the one.’” The child of Mexican immigrants and raised in Connecticut, Castro could relate to how the Quintanillas had a foot in two cultures: “Selena was so inspiring to me because of her unapologetic confidence in her identity.”
Over the course of two years, Castro and producer J. Daniel Torres spent about 10 hours a day, five days a week, poring through the material, clocking moments that would best serve the story. The sheer volume was daunting. “Suzette opens the door to this room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases of VHS tapes, CDs, flash drives, original film, albums, and boxes with photos,” she says. “It felt like we entered a sacred space, and I found it overwhelming in this way I’d never experienced in my career—both in terms of process and deciding how to distill this into a film. But the responsibility of access to that archive is what drove me and the whole team to work as hard as we did.”
Interviews with the Quintanilla family were a delicate process that took six months. Marcella, the family matriarch, was especially reluctant about participating. Says Suzette, “My mother suffers from depression from losing my sister. She gets extremely emotional, and I didn’t think she was going to do it. I had to tiptoe around it and do the whole cute face on her, like, ‘Please, Mom, it’s important for you to be a part of this, because you played a huge role in keeping us grounded and showing us the way we deserve to be as women.’”
