Selena, Crossing Over

"It's like watching a cop show right in your own front yard.''
-- Allison Shantz, who viewed the police standoff with Selena's accused killer from a balcony of the Corpus Christi Days Inn, quoted in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times

"Selena looked like the majority of us and she was beautiful ... Selena gave Mexican-Americans a tremendous amount of pride because she brought our music and community a great deal of recognition."

-- Tatcho Mindiola Jr., director of UH's Mexican-American Studies program, in the Houston Chronicle

"... I never heard of her ..."
-- Initial reaction of more than one white or black Houstonian to the local media coverage of Selena's death

"I don't believe she's really in there."
-- Middle-aged mourner at Selena's closed-casket wake to a Houston TV reporter. Later, Selena's family would open the casket.

"Why would anybody want to buy that kind of shirt?"
-- Eddie Quintanilla, Selena's uncle, quoted in the Chronicle on the T-shirts with a picture of Selena in her casket being sold on the street in front of her home

"... three of us ate her fingers."
--"Satirist" Howard Stern, cannibalizing Selena

"What this man has done is outrageous. What this man has done is inhuman."
-- City Councilman Ben Reyes, on Howard Stern

"I started to listen to her music when she sang about the carcacha (an old car falling apart)."

-- Elsa Vasquez, 57, of Corpus Christi, in the Austin Statesman-American

"Goodbye Selena/We Loved Your Music/You Are Beautiful ..."
-- Message on a piece of yellow ribbon tied on the bumper of an early-model station wagon spotted on a Houston street

"I wish Selena had a gun."
-- State Representative Ron Wilson, House sponsor of the "right to carry" bill