It was especially remarkable given the fact that Gomez had never voted before 2020. Had she done the blue-state thing of assuming her vote didn’t matter? “I just had no idea,” she says, sounding sad and unguarded. “Either I didn’t care or I just was not recognizing the importance of who’s running our country, and that’s really scary to think about.” In a conversation with vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, she explained that she hadn’t previously been educated on the importance of voting. (She tells me that she didn’t hesitate to share this with the public, because she knew there were “a million people my age” who were in the same boat.) During election week, she was tense and terrified; she stayed up late watching the news, waiting for new batches of votes to be counted. Though Gomez is still wary of being divisive—at one point in our conversation, she tries to think of a way to describe the Trump administration and lands on “pretty hard to like”—she tells me she’s thrilled about the election’s outcome. Videos have been circulating, in the flourishing ecosystem of the Selena Gomez fan internet, of Gomez in New York, the day the election was called for Joe Biden, saying that no human is illegal; in another video, she’s in the back seat of a car, smiling deliriously, singing Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.”
Gomez was born in Grand Prairie, Texas, a midsize town outside Dallas that once had a professional baseball team called the Airhogs, the kind of place where the top employers include Lockheed Martin and Walmart. Her parents were both 16 when she was born, in 1992. Gomez grew up in a neighborhood that was mainly Mexican-American, like her dad’s family. (Her mother, Mandy Teefey, who managed Gomez’s career until 2014, identifies as white.) She was named after Selena Quintanilla, whose music both her parents loved. Her mom let her splash around in the yard during rainstorms; her dad liked to watch Friday and Bad Boys with his cherubic baby girl. “It always smelled like fresh-cut grass,” Gomez remembers of her childhood in Texas. “We’d play outside for hours, and my nana and her friends would be sitting with their iced tea. It wasn’t a lot, but it was great.”
As a kid, Gomez was sensitive but fearless: A picture of her comforting another kid on the first day of pre-K made the local paper. (“Apparently I had just been like, ‘Peace!’ to my mom and walked right in,” she tells me.) She staged concerts in the living room and loved frilling herself up to compete in that particular Southern ritual—the beauty pageant. Gomez’s parents broke up when she was five, and Teefey mustered all her wherewithal to provide for her kid, working simultaneously at a Starbucks, a Dave & Buster’s, and a Podunk modeling agency. She ably shielded Gomez from the ever-present financial difficulties. “I remember always being reminded that people had less than we did,” Gomez says. “And we didn’t have much. But I felt like we did because my mom was always doing a hundred million things just to make me happy, and we volunteered at soup kitchens on Thanksgiving; we went through my closet for Goodwill.”
When she was 10, she was cast, alongside Demi Lovato, on Barney& Friends, which was conveniently shot in another Dallas suburb. The job didn’t feel like work: “You’re on set with a big purple dinosaur and dancing and having a great time,” she says, laughing. Three years after she wrapped her run on the show, she secured the role of Alex Russo on the Disney Channel show Wizards of Waverly Place and moved to Los Angeles with her mom. Gomez’s desire to oblige and enchant, inherent in any young performer, became enshrined as a mandate. Working for Disney turned Gomez’s life into a perpetual promotion, with her image quickly distributed through TV, music, movies, merchandise, live appearances, and cross-promotion of all of the above. “That was my job in a way—to be perfect,” she says. “You’re considered a figure kids look up to, and they take that seriously there.” Gomez’s Wizards character was sly and sardonic, lazy about both school and wizardry—that was the concept, by the way: a family of wizards running a West Village sandwich shop. But Alexandra Margarita Russo still radiated the essential Disney-girl quality: a spunky, unselfconscious precocity and confidence.
It became part of Gomez’s job to maintain that aura even as, simultaneously, the tabloid media began treating her as an object of interest. She was 15 when paparazzi began showing up on set. Her onscreen brothers, David Henrie and Jake Austin, felt protective of her. “We were all new to this, and they wanted to say things to the paparazzi, but you can’t, because that’s exactly what the paparazzi want,” Gomez says. “I remember going to the beach with some family members who were visiting, and we saw, far away, grown men with cameras—taking pictures of a 15-year-old in her swimsuit. That is a violating feeling.”
I ask Gomez whether she was aware of how invasive this situation was as it was happening, or if she brushed it off in the moment. “I think I spent so many years just trying to say the right thing to people for the sake of keeping myself sane,” she says. By dint of her personality, as well as the fact that she was a young woman in the spotlight, she had to be unconditionally grateful, composed, sparkling. “I’m just such a people-pleaser,” she adds.
Gomez has recently spoken about the fact that her paternal grandparents were undocumented. “It wasn’t for any reason that I didn’t share it before,” she says. “It’s just that as I started to see the world for what it is, all these things started to be like light bulbs going off.” Her grandparents came to Texas in a “back-of-the-truck situation,” Gomez tells me, “and it took them 17 years to get citizenship. I remember that being such a huge deal. My grandpa was working construction, hiring hundreds of people, and still they were living on the edge, covering up how scary it was.” Gomez remembers being a teenager, at a Shania Twain show in Vegas with her dad, when a stranger yelled that her dad was a wetback. “I started crying,” she says. “But my dad grabbed me and just walked away. I cried even more. I thought, I hate that my dad feels so depleted by this.” Over the past few years, Gomez started learning more about the immigration system, having conversations with friends who had firsthand experience with its bureaucratic snarls. In 2019, she served as an executive-producer for the Netflix series Living Undocumented. “My goal was to communicate that these people are not ‘aliens’; they’re not whatever names other people have given them. They’re humans—they’re people,” she says. The author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, who wrote the dazzling, defiant 2020 book The Undocumented Americans about this very subject, tells me, “My dad was an undocumented delivery man on Wall Street, and he catered galas for the fanciest New York City families, and very important men sent him to the freight elevator with the trash because they didn’t think he was human.” She sent her book to Gomez because she felt a kinship—“another Latina young woman who was self-made and clever and beautiful and successful and kind, who struggled and reinvented herself and metabolized her suffering in her art”—and sensed that Gomez understood the elemental sin of this dehumanization. When Gomez championed the book, lending it her endorsem*nt and speaking about it in interviews and on Instagram, it was “a special moment for thousands of Latinx youth, many of them undocumented and queer. They felt like she had our back. I felt like she had our back too.” Cornejo Villavicencio says that some of her most loyal readers now are Selenators. “And I love them fiercely.”
