The Selena Foundation Threatened to Pull the Plug on the Annual Fiesta De La Flor

The legacy of Selena Quintanilla is everywhere. Her music is still on the radio and streaming online. Her face is sold on T-shirts and merch globally. Her story continues to inspire new TV projects. You could say, Selena is bigger this year than ever before. Yet, for some reason, the Quintanilla’s Fiesta de la Flor festival — their annual music event honoring Selena — isn’t bringing in the cash flow they’d like to see.

According to Corpus Christi Caller Times, this year for the first time since the inception of the festival in 2015, Fiesta de la Flor did not bring in a profit. The festival generates an estimated “$10.8 million economic impact for the city every year,” yet the Selena Foundation has only made less than $100,000 in the four years of the festival.

Last week, the Corpus Christi Convention and Visitors Bureau CEO Paulette Kluge said that amount was unacceptable. So this year they planned to give the Selena Foundation $50,000. She cited that “the city is making millions of dollars.” Because the bureau is now taking $50,000 from the festival to the foundation, that concludes the festival has no profit to report for this year.

The Quintanilla family told the bureau they deserved more than they had been given, so that’s exactly what’s happening now.

“Everybody is benefiting except the Selena Foundation, and they said, ‘It is unacceptable, and if we don’t get something for the Selena Foundation, there will not be another Fiesta de la Flor,’ ” Kluge said, according to the Caller Times. “So I agreed to pay them $35,000 last year, which was all of our profits, and $50,000 moving forward.”

But what is the Selena Foundation exactly? There is no website for the foundation, but a 2016 article stated the foundation formed to honor Selena’s legacy as well as give scholarships. However, the foundation has faced some tax issues in the past and is not considered a nonprofit.

“I think, obviously, the challenge here is that we just need to have … a system that is more transparent, so that way the public and obviously all the stewards of the funds can understand where we’re going,” Council Member Roland Barrera, a member of the committee, said last week. “It’s just we need to get on a track where we understand if there’s a deficit or what the challenge is.”

Interestingly enough, the publication reports that Q Productions and the Quintanilla family had no comment about the monetary exchange.