Selena, Seen Clearly

LOS ANGELES — In Greek mythology, Selene is the moon goddess, the one who lights the night sky not by force but by reflection. According to the Quintanilla family, a nurse suggested the name to Marcella and Abraham on the day their daughter was born. It’s a small detail revealed midway through Isabel Castro’s Selena y Los Dinos, yet it lands with quiet inevitability. What else could she have been named? What else could she have become?

“My goal was to separate Selena from the symbolism and get to know her as a person,” Castro tells me over Zoom before the film’s Netflix November 17 debut. “The shift happened as I spent time in Corpus. The family talks about her as someone they lost, not an icon, not a legend, but a sister, daughter, wife.”

This is not the Selena of the 1997 biopic, whose story follows the clean arc of a hero. Castro is not interested in reenactment. She’s interested in proximity. “Our film is the scrapbook version,” she told IDA. Scrapbooks are lived-in, messy, curated, and unvarnished. They reveal what a family decides is worth remembering.

What Selena y Los Dinos offers is not the myth but the memory.

When I asked Castro what it means to be a Latina making nonfiction work at this scale, she answered with a mix of clarity and frustration. “Sometimes my work gets siloed into being exclusively for a Latino audience. I spend a lot of time fighting the assumption that these stories aren’t universal.”

This, too, is part of the film’s ethos: Latina stories are not confined to the Latina community. They speak to everyone willing to listen.

Castro’s filmography is grounded in patient excavation, observational, unhurried, and committed. But with Selena y Los Dinos, the stakes feel larger. She steps into a lineage of Latina documentarians who are reshaping cultural memory, defining which archives matter and what intimacy on-screen can look like. Take the documentary series by María José Cuevas on Juan Gabriel — it, too, moves the needle on how we tell stories driven by the archive. Or Frida Kahlo documentary by Carla Gutiérrez, who also premiered at Sundance just last year.

For the Quintanillas, this documentary becomes something they have never fully had: their own uninterrupted voice.

Criticism of the family — about control, commercialization, or exposure — has followed them for decades. Castro doesn’t erase that history, but she doesn’t center it either. Instead, the documentary allows them to articulate Selena’s story on their own terms, without Hollywood’s filter or fandom’s demands.

With access to tens of thousands of photos, tapes, letters, and home videos, the film feels less like a retrospective and more like a reintroduction. We see sibling arguments, rehearsal-room choreography, the early discrimination the band faced in Texas, and the sting of rejection in Mexico. We hear Abraham Jr. describe creative struggles, the evolution from The Dinos to Los Dinos, and the fusion that defined their sound: cumbia from Pete, funk from A.B., pop from Selena herself.

Most strikingly, we see the band as a band — artists shaping a sound long before crossover discussions.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Castro about Selena’s most underrated contribution. She didn’t hesitate.

“Her fashion.”

Castro laughs, remembering when Suzette pointed out the cow print outfits the band once wore. “When I saw the footage, I fell in love with them. I started buying cow print myself. Now I see it everywhere.”

The anecdote points to a larger truth: Selena was always slightly ahead of the culture, bending sound, style, and identity into something expansive enough to hold her. Her R&B rehearsals, pop instincts, the band’s rock influences — these threads foreshadowed the posthumous crossover moment that made history.

Her bicultural fluency — once a source of insecurity — became a generational blueprint. And while the 1997 “estoy muy excited” line suggests otherwise, the documentary shows her Spanish evolving confidently in real time.

Suzy Exposito of The Los Angeles Times wrote that the film is an ode to “the unparalleled intimacy of sisterhood itself.” She’s right. The scenes of Suzette and Selena rehearsing, laughing, and working through their tensions together are among the film’s quietest yet most revealing moments.

Through Suzette — the protector, the witness — we see Selena not as an icon, but as a sibling whose loss is still tender and still shaping the family’s emotional orbit.

Ultimately, this is a film about grief, but not as spectacle. It’s more about continuation. The Quintanillas are not moving on — they are moving with, holding memory as a form of resilience 30 years later.

Before our interview ended, I asked Castro what she would tell Latinas hoping to document their communities and cultural histories. She offered a principle that feels like instruction and inheritance:

“Authenticity always comes through the screen. Find the most authentic way to tell the story, then find the universality in it. People respond to stories where they can find some version of themselves.”

In Selena y Los Dinos, Castro does exactly that. She makes a film that speaks intimately to Latino audiences but opens itself to anyone willing to meet its tenderness.

Selena — a new moon goddess, named on a whim by a nurse — returns through archival tapes, cow-print outfits, bilingual dreams, and the love of a family still orbiting her. She returns not as an idol, but as a person. She is a daughter, a sister, a young woman who lit the sky and continues to pull us toward her.

Not through mythology.

But through memory.

Francisco Avilés Pino is a Mexican writer and producer based in Los Angeles, whose work spans journalism, film, and fine art, exploring how power, identity, and culture shape immigrant and Latino/a life in America. Their work has appeared in the Museum of Contemporary Art-LA, HarperCollins, NPR, Vogue, The Nation, and The Intercept.

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This edition of The Latino Newsletter was edited and published by Julio Ricardo Varela.

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