Rudy Treviño was 6 or 7 years old when he first met Abraham Quintanilla. Long before most of the world knew him as Selena’s father, Quintanilla was onstage as a member of Los Dinos, playing family-friendly shows in small Texas towns. As he came off the bandstand one night, he passed a little boy standing near the stage, reached out, and touched him on the head.
Decades later, Treviño would remind Quintanilla of that moment. By then, both men were working to promote Tejano music and culture — Treviño as a TV anchor, radio host, and historian; Quintanilla as the driving force behind one of the most successful acts the genre has ever seen, Selena y Los Dinos. “I told him the story,” Treviño recalls. “He said, ‘I have no idea. But I’m glad you were the kid I tapped. There was destiny between us.’” The two became lifelong friends.
Abraham Isaac Quintanilla Jr., patriarch of the Quintanilla family and a central architect of Selena’s career and legacy, died Dec. 13, 2025, in Corpus Christi, Texas. He was 86.
If you are a Selena fan, you are inevitably familiar with his story and stern, stoic work ethic. It’s a unifying theme across three of the most popular, family-sanctioned works about the life and death of Selena: the 1997 movie starring Jennifer Lopez, the 18-part Netflix series and the more recent documentary, also on Netflix.
But for Treviño, who is finishing a book and audio project called American Tejano: From the Barrio to the Bandstand, Quintanilla’s death is more than the loss of an individual. It marks the passing of a generation that believed survival — for Mexican American families, for Tejano music — depended on work, discipline and relentless belief in their own sound.
“It was always about family”
For his upcoming book, Treviño interviewed Quintanilla and one line from that conversation still echoes. “Everything he did was about one thing and one thing only: Family,” Treviño says. “That’s powerful.”
Growing up in Beeville, Texas, Treviño remembers a childhood with few options: “Either you got in trouble, you did very hard work on farms and ranches or the local grocery store, or you found music.” The musicians who came through town were superheroes. Among them were Quintanilla and the original Dinos.
As Treviño built his own career — working for ABC and Disney, returning to Texas as a TV anchor and later launching the syndicated show “Tejano Gold Countdown” — their paths kept crossing: at festivals in Texas, club dates in Los Angeles, even Las Vegas industry events. After Treviño moved back to South Texas, the friendship deepened.
Quintanilla, he says, quietly helped him get the radio show off the ground in the mid‑1990s, when the world was suddenly paying attention to Tejano music after Selena’s murder. It is not a coincidence that he launched the show after her death — but despite fan reaction, the outpouring of emotion, and English songs like “Dreaming of You” hitting No. 1, he still had to convince program directors of the music’s viability and crossover appeal. A project with ABC Radio stalled—and then the network handed its research, contacts, and demo materials to Treviño. From that handoff, “Tejano Gold Countdown” was born, fashioned after Casey Kasem’s Top 40 program.
Today, the show is a weekend staple for Latino communities across the United States and in parts of Mexico. Quintanilla watched that growth closely. “He was always silently helping,” Treviño says.
Guardian, gatekeeper, and working musician to the end
At times, public discussion of Quintanilla has been polarized. Fans and observers have criticized him as controlling or overly protective, especially in portrayals that revisit Selena’s story for new generations but rely on similar tropes and storylines.
Even those critics, however, tend to acknowledge that without his drive and structure, Selena’s career would not have broken through.
In an obituary, URL Media network partner Latina Media Collective described Abraham Quintanilla as a patriarch whose life “raises enduring questions about ambition and protection, grief and control, and who gets to author cultural memory.” It also credited him with publicly and vocally championing Tejano and Spanish‑language music in a country that often treated them as marginal.
Treviño’s memories capture this ethic toward work and community. After Selena’s death, Quintanilla continued to record Tejano artists at Q Productions’ studio in Corpus Christi, always scouting for new talent. He launched a television program, “Enfoque Musical,” focused on Tejano bands, preserving performances on DVD and documenting lineups that might otherwise have been lost.
In later years, visits with Quintanilla followed a familiar pattern. “If he invited you to lunch or breakfast, you knew you’d spend half a day with him,” Treviño says, laughing. They would eat at a local spot (Hi-Ho, Selena’s favorite restaurant), then head back to the studio so Quintanilla could play him new mixes. Staff at Q Productions and the Selena Museum knew Treviño well. “There were always a ton of people at the museum,” he says. “He loved showing you what he was working on.” (Ironically, just weeks before this writing, URL Media had been planning a trip to the museum with Treviño as tour guide.)
As his health declined and early dementia set in, the family moved Quintanilla closer to them. Treviño says he has been in touch with Q Productions since the death, but is giving the family space to grieve.
Keeping Selena alive for new generations
Why does Selena endure? Treviño spends a lot of time thinking about why. He describes her as “genuine, unassuming, not an arrogant bone in her body,” someone whose kindness and charisma were as visible as her talent. Crucially, she was embraced first by her own community.
“To be accepted by your own culture is amazing,” Treviño says. “Her own culture helped launch her career because everybody knew she was genuine.” That authenticity, he argues, is what allows Selena to continue resonating decades after her death — with little kids hearing her at quinceañeras today, or discovering her through the Netflix shows, or icons like Rita Moreno and namesake Selena Gomez reminiscing about her impact.
And her appeal only widened. Selena grew to be beloved far beyond Texas and Latin America, transcending nationalities and neighborhoods. “She’s universal,” declares Treviño, now a professor at Texas A&M-Kingsville where he is launching a new institute dedicated to archiving and celebrating Tejano and other Texas-based music genres.
After his daughter’s death in 1995, Abraham Quintanilla’s mission was clear and singular: to make sure that resonance did not fade. Through the Selena Museum, careful control of her image and catalog, and continued involvement in Tejano projects, he worked to ensure she was never reduced to a tragic footnote.
“That’s what Mr. Q was trying to preserve,” Treviño says. “Her image, her spirit, continued through her art. And it has — thank God it has.”
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