Award-winning conductor Felipe Tristán, a native of Monterrey, Mexico, dazzled a Texas audience for three days as he led the San Antonio Philharmonic orchestra in honoring Selena, the famous Tejano singer and her iconic music at the Majestic Theater last week [January 3-5, 2025]. Grammy-nominated vocalist and Tejano Music Award winner, Isabel Marie Sánchez, gave a magnificent Selena Vive! performance singing many of Selena’s most popular songs.
Isabel Marie Sanchez grew up in San Antonio and was discovered at the Mercado [Market Square] not far from the Majestic Theater. She was eleven years old when the famous Mexican music show Sabado Gigante agents saw her perform and asked her to enter their singing contest. She won $1,000 for singing La Malagueña for a Father’s Day singing competition. That same year she joined the popular Mexican reality television show La Voz Kids and won acclaim for her stirring rendition of Cucurrucucu Paloma, a song made popular by Lola Beltrán, one of the young singer’s early inspirations.
After the splendid San Antonio Selena tribute, Isabel Marie Sanchez stood in the Majestic Theater lobby greeting fans. It was there that Harriett and I met Isabel’s parents Carlos and Ramona Sanchez. The event was a coming-home for the Sanchez family who raised their daughter in San Antonio. The parents noted that after their precocious daughter’s performances with La Voz Kids, she signed with Selena’s father Abraham Quintanilla of Q Productions. Isabel Marie recorded her first songs in the Quintanilla studios where Selena had recorded some of her biggest hits.
In a 2022 interview, Isabel Marie Sanchez told magazine writer Fátima Ramírez of Acción Latina that singing had always been in her blood. Isabel Marie’s father was a musician and her mother sang at home. Isabel Marie explained: “My parents always showed me different genres. We would go from Lola Beltrán to Whitney Houston, then to Mariah Carey, then Vicente Fernández. And then like Earth, Wind & Fire, then Michael Jackson. So it was like always all over the place, and Andrea Bocelli. So I always loved that because I grabbed inspiration from different artists.”
In 2016, Sanchez became the youngest recipient to be honored as the Best New Female Artist at the Tejano Music Awards. Her second album, Sígueme (2017), was nominated for Album of the Year, while her third studio effort, Xoxo – Hugs and Kisses (2018), achieved significant sales.
Sanchez has a bright future. The young singer told Fátima Ramírez in a 2022 interview, “If I’m blessed enough to be able to do what I love every single day, and do that for my job then I’m definitely going to bless people back– at least make them smile by singing them a song. I would love to be able to do that for the rest of my life.”
Selena, the most popular Latina singer of her generation, was with us for too short a time. In that time, she lifted Latina and Tejano music to new national and global heights. She became the undisputed Queen, or Reina, of Tejano and Cumbia music. Her records have sold more than 18 million worldwide, making her one of the best-selling female artists in Latin music. She was the only female artist to have five albums on the Billboard 200 simultaneously
Selena’s music empire included fans from the United States, Mexico, and beyond. Her songs crossed international borders and were sung in English and Spanish. Selena, who had started a band, Selena y Los Dinos, when she was eleven years old, became a rising young singer by her early teens.
Her songs recorded in the album Entre a mi Mundo were influenced by R&B, pop, and disco, but also by her personal style of Colombian cumbias. Music critic Nili Blanck commented that Selena merits the title as the “queen of cumbia” because she was one of the first musicians to sing in a tecnocumbia style, which incorporated hip-hop beats and disco-style dance movements.”
Selena’s first Tejano album “Ven Conmigo” recorded in 1990 had sold over 500,000 copies by the time she received her Grammy Award in 1993. Her album “Dreaming of You” was a groundbreaking success—selling 175,000 copies on its first day of release, a record for a female vocalist at the time. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, selling 331,000 copies in its first week on the Billboard. That album became the first predominantly Spanish-language album to debut and peak at number one on the Billboard 200 chart. Despite her emerging star status, she changed little and gave her fans abundant time and attention.
Selena’s popularity grew as evident by the 70,000 attendees who saw her perform at the Féria Expomex in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico in September 1993. That same year over 55,000 fans saw her perform at the Houston Astrodome. She was named the U.S top-selling Latin artist of the 1990s decade by Billboard magazine.Selena remains the best-selling Tejano recording artist in history and her fan base expanded as Mexican radio stations began playing her recordings. Selena’s music included a special Latino rhythm that appealed to South American audiences as well. Her album “Amor Prohibido” was certified multi-platinum for a remarkable production of 3.54 million units in the US.
