Google has a fairly good musical doodle today honoring Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla, who was tragically murdered at age 23 in 1995 by a horrible fan who had stolen money from her.  The doodle's simplified, somewhat generic graphics clearly enough illustrate much of her biography – from a child who enjoyed singing into hairbrushes on her bed to a girl who joined her family in a band, and then to a young woman who went on to become a star.  It leaves off her tragic death, hoping to advertise just that she was a success story, perhaps.  Best part of it is the singing – Selena really did have a strong, beautiful singing voice well worth remembering, and that was rightly included.

But then you go to read the articles linked to the doodle, and you learn how ignorant Google's graphic artists were about who she was.  Worse still, they had an ulterior agenda, which was to claim Selena as an immigrant and to use her as a champion for illegals and amnesty.

What...basura.

In an interview with Billboard, Perla Campos, Google's global marketing lead for Google Doodles, said this:

When asked what message this Doodle could be sending in today's political climate, one ruled by fear and apprehension when it comes to the unknown status DACA Dreamers, Campos' response was perfectly Selena. 

"Selena was always about transcending boundaries, and for someone who has such a powerful story to be featured on the homepage of Google – a search engine that connects people the way she connected people – that is such a beautiful thing. Featuring an immigrant woman should not be political, it should be celebrated."

Um, especially if she's not an immigrant, Perla.  Which Selena was not.

Selena did indeed transcend boundaries, all right – not by bringing Mexico to the U.S., but by bringing the U.S. to Mexico.

As her biography shows, she was 100% American, and so were her parents, so she was at least a third-generation American and probably went back a lot farther than that.  There was nothing immigrant about her.  Her region was Texas, and her family is known as Tex-Mex or Tejano, and that is 100% American, even as there is natural cultural overlap with the northern side of Mexico.  Fact is, Texas and Mexico have been hybridized since the very beginning, and don't think Mexicans in the tonier areas, such as Mexico City, don't look disdainfully on this blended culture.  Bottom line: Tex-Mex is American on this side and Mexican on the other even as the cultures, which include the music and the food, naturally come together.

Selena was far more American than she is given credit for by Google.  Her first language was English, and she didn't even learn Spanish (probably incompletely at that) until she began singing and generating hits in Spanish, her music first catching on to fans in Mexico.  So it was Selena transcending boundaries, all right – by bringing her American Tex-Mex or Tejano sound south of the border.  Yet what she longed for, according to her bio, was to record songs in English, happily winning a record contract with EMI to sing in English, as she had hoped, shortly before her untimely death.

Since she isn't here to speak for herself, her views on illegal immigration, contrary to what Google speculates, are unknown.  What is known is that quite a few Tex-Mexes are very conservative in their views, and many take a rule-of-law approach to immigration.  We don't know what Selena's views on this were or why the views of such a non-immigrant should be important.  Google thinks it's important because of how she looked, probably – classically Latina – and now seems to be eager to make her into a fake immigrant to champion illegals on those grounds alone.

Why can't they just appreciate her for who she was?