YOLANDA SALDIVAR as BFF for life and Selena’s murderer, in possession of breasts and a vagina, short hair when she’s a villain, long hair in a braid when she’s little and playing hide-and-seek, massive manipulator, possible lesbian, behind bars, hand reaching out of the dirt with vengeance.
MAMI as smell of cloro on Sunday mornings, heavy feet thumping up the stairs, wet men’s jacket hanging up to dry, sound of urine sprinkling because the door was left open, discounted bottle of wine, salty soup on a hot day, hand over the mouth because there’s a pain in a tooth, bras tangled in one another and left in the dryer.
PAPI/ABRAHAM QUINTANILLA as the word “reloj,” which you must learn to say if you’re going to start singing in Spanish, as in, the future isn’t real. The future is just a story we tell. Everything is a sign if you think about it. One day you’ll be on a stage and you’ll hear the applause deep in the center of you. You’re the stadium. You’re the emergency exit signs. You’re the overpriced churros. You’re the chariot led by white horses. One day you’ll get news and you’ll be squealing, jumping up and down, wrapping your legs around the first person you can see. You are looking up at yourself. You are about to get there. You are always gonna be my little girl.
SELENA QUINTANILLA-PÉREZ as a star I can only see because it has died. As a girl in love. As a sister and a daughter and a wife, but never a mother. As all of our dreams in the shape of a woman bleeding out on a carpet. As many old women, with wrinkled hands, dyeing white hairs. Alive and dead and in-between and always dancing.
SHE is born out of spite, the most fertile feeling. She kills her birth mother when she violently pushes the birth walls open and makes everyone scream with the branches growing out of her ears. She smells like manifested fear that is also perverse. She is the self that flares up when there is mention of somebody prettier and rattles the insides with her fists. She is what is trained out with good posture and disapproving looks. She has a photo album dedicated to humiliation that she takes out during parties. She wears a Freudian slip and loves the way her nipples feel underneath it. She is the shadow side. The bad side. Evil side. Whatever that means.
LAS CHISMOSAS as the eyes and the ears, the ones who know you before you even know you, as the stories whispered in the night and whatever lights up the asses of fireflies, as the page, indented, as the fight at the wedding and the retelling of the fight, as your tías, as your tatara abuelas, as a crumpled-up note picked up by the wrong person or perhaps the right person, the only person.
YOU as the consumer and the consumed. As the dear reader. As the drawing in the notebook and then the back of the man in the ethnic foods aisle, the stranger on the bus; in the elevator getting off before romance started, standing on top of a bucket of paint, sitting on the edge of the bed practicing your instrument, using your hands to wipe up the dust on the floor, using a blow-dryer to dry your socks, sweating deep into your shirt, faceless in an audience, face lit up by the screen.
MELISSA LOZADA-OLIVA it’s been me, it’s always been me. The whole time.