Before she turned nine years old, a pretty Texas girl named Selena Quintanilla Perez was already singing at roadhouse dance halls and weddings, purveying a bright, up-tempo version of traditional Mexican-American border music. A little more than a decade later, she was the Grammy-winning queen of the booming "Tejano" music market, playing to crowds of 60,000 and selling more than 1.5 million records in the U.S. and Mexico. "Never in my dreams would I have thought that I would become this big," she told TIME in a recent interview. "I am still freaking out."
On Friday, two weeks shy of her...
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