anxiety, lupus and, now, meme

The children’s actress accrued Popstar, a chronic disease, psychiatric diagnoses, self -suffering narratives and self lovean image of a good girl that manages to preserve over the years, but that produces less and less sympathy. Thinking about Selena Gomez’s story is to think about Disney’s rise as a factory of teenage stars in the 2000s.

Born in Texas in 1992, she is the daughter of a father of Mexican roots (her paternal grandparents crossed the border from Mexico in the 1970s) and an American mother who They decided to baptize her in tribute to singer Selena Quintanilla, a diva of the ’90 that marked the course of Latin music.

With a name that makes clear the expectations that his family has probably had about his future, Selena Gomez began her career as an actress at age seven, in the series Barney and his friends.

According to his own story, in the first hearing, She and six more prodigies were selected among one thousand five hundred children. Within that select group was also the singer today known as Demi Lovato, who would become her unconditional friend and with which years later he would cut any link mysteriously.

Entering the Disney industrial machinery, at that time, assured any young actress a more or less linear rise path towards fame. And so it was: after his role in Barney, Selena had to star in the series WAVERLY PLACE Sorcerers At fifteen.

Became an authentic authorized Disney girl, with appearances in other series of the moment as Zack y Cody o Hannah Montana, Selena began to get her own songs in 2009. Almost all had to do with self -love and it was normal for recording Spanish versions of their hits in honor of their Mexican ancestry.

From these first years songs such as Naturally, Love you Like a Love Song o One year without rainimperble I remember for any preteen adept to the TKM magazine that has grown in the 2000 generation.

But I wanted more adult roles, I wanted to stop feeling that they took her like a joke. And the neon lights, the aesthetics of Early MTV, the sordid world and White Trash by director Harmony Korine – that of Kids and Gummo – was the perfect excuse to tear down his virginal image with a role in the film Spring Breakers (2012). At eighteen, a new selena appeared, A girl who smiled at the camera with imposted mischief, emulating a “shh” gesture with his hands and holding a gun.

The film, with a cast made up of different teen actresses at that time (including Vanessa Hudgens, protagonist of High School Musical), Tell the story of a group of university girls who are prey for drug positions After having assaulted a fast food restaurant, and they are unexpectedly rescued by a drug trafficker who leads them to live a life of luxuries and excesses.

His phosphorescent bikinis —The only clothes that are wearing when they arrest them— They are the costume they use during the whole moviein addition to its furious pink balaclavas. A succession of dream scenes that evoke the aroma to Victoria’s Secret mixed with that of cold beer, plans that frame stirred cocaine stripes in a pastel pink filter.

As if a curse had broken, after the milest Hands To Myself or the controversy Bad Liarin which His fans claimed to listen to her between verse and verse. With a fresh sound and natural beauty without much concern for particular aesthetic trends, it seemed to be on its way to becoming a solid popstar on the map of the North American stars.

It is difficult not to ask what went wrong. Why, despite his level of fame –selena Gomez is, today, The woman with more followers on Instagram-, did you fail to become one of the stars of its generation that, initiated in Disney, maintained careers of more or less successful singers?

We could blame your anxiety problemsthat in 2014 they pushed her to cancel her world tour to enter the Meadows Clinic, the same one through which Kate Moss and Donatella Versace passed. EITHER to lupus, autoimmune disease that suffers and forced it to chemotherapy and, later, to a kidney transplant in 2017.

Or bipolar disorder that was diagnosed a year later And to whom he dedicated his documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, oa his mediated relationship with another youth star, Justin Bieber, who cultivated news in all gossip magazines For almost a decade (even today the Model Hailey Bieber, current wife of Justin, attacks Selena with small teasing implicit in her social networks).

In each of these stories his victim figure is built, either of the disease, of a toxic relationship or the cruelty of the Gossip world. Faced with adversities, Selena maintains her motto Kill ‘Em with Kindness (Something like “Kind them with kindness”), the phrase that gives name to one of its most characteristic tracks. His image was never that of an overflowing diva but, rather, that of a girl without airs of greatness who seeks a luxurious but peaceful life.

Unlike other stars raised in Disney such as Miley Cyrus, who knew how to build his career from a rebel provocation addressed to that factory that saw her grow, The naif germ remains in Selena. Or maybe, from the beginning, part of herself.

From 2020, Selena’s appearances had more to do with the promotions of her makeup brand, Rare Beauty, than with his artist career. But after a string of years without acting papers with a lot of impact and rare, a pop album that also had no great reactions, He gave again what to talk about his role in Emilia Perezthe film directed by the Frenchman Jacques Audiard that premiered on May 18, 2024 at the Cannes Festival.

With thirteen Nominations for the 2025 Oscar Awards, Emilia Perez It is difficult to catalog, But it could well be said that it is a music melodramal. Set in Mexico, it is about hands, a narco boss who decides to have a sex change operation to become a woman and thus leave behind the bad life. An argument that looks like a stereotype extracted from the conservative speeches of Donald Trump or Javier Milei: The idea that trans women are disguised men to get unscathed from their criminal acts.

One more time, Selena Gomez is attracted to the sordid scenarios of cinema. This time in the role of Jessi, the wife of Manitas who breaks into tears when she finds out through the news that her husband has committed suicide. What he does not know is that, in reality, his “husband” has admitted to a clinic to “become a woman” – the idea of ​​”transition” does not appear in this film as an identity construction but as an immediate clinical procedure – and that soon It will awaken with a fully transformed body, from facial surgery to vaginoplasty, and a new personality more focused on domestic than in kidnappings and drugs.

A poster chief who becomes by magic in a neighborhood lady, Broadway choreographies accompanied by songs that pass from the seriousness with which drug trafficking address to expressions of the “My Pompis” type, dialogues with absurd syntactic constructions in an indistinguishable Spanish constructions.

For moments, Emilia Perez It seems an experiment to exploit its bizarre components, its ethical limits, A Kitsch opera in defense of “bad taste”.

The film could be a parody of itself, of the current world in which Tiktok’s lobotomizing synthesis, from the Eurocentrist look on Latin America (and perhaps for some it is: John Waters, for example, chose it as one of his favorites of 2024), but His worst mistake is that, rather than a humorous code, his tone is great.

“It even hurts the click vulva just thinking about you,” says Selena Gomez in an almost unintelligible Spaniards, revealing that the language is not even close to being her first tongue (although most of the plot develops in Mexico, none of the main actors is a native Mexican).

Selena responded to criticism assuming guilt, and arguing that she did not have enough time to preparebut that “that does not take away how much work and heart was put in this movie.” Another mark of that humility – for some exacerbated – on which he builds his public image: Never dismiss those who criticize her.

The public not only questioned his acting skills, with the clips of his ridiculized dramatic scenes and turned into memes. It is claimed, above all, having participated in a film that stigmatizes Mexico as a dangerous and precarious country without any deep study of their culture.

That is why the Internet – almost as an abstract entity, as collective consciousness– He did not forgave her when on January 27 she uploaded a video crying to her Instagram account after the newly assumed Donald Trump threatened to start the mass deportations of Mexican immigrants. “All my people are being attacked, the children …”, said in English a selena Dam of anguish in a clip that he deleted after criticism scaled both in their quantity and at their levels of aggression (They were mainly Mexican outraged by their role in Emilia Perezbut others like Samuel Parker, a Republican politician who asked to be deported) joined.

Selena’s words remain among the lines of her usual registration: “Apparently, it is not good to show empathy towards the demas”. Kill them with kindness.

Perhaps the answer to the question of why Selena could not keep up as a popstar that, In a world that rewards carelessness and controversy, the image of a simple and good girl who assumes her faults with Christian humility is less and less valid. And that seems to be its authentic nature, for more weapons and bills that surround it.