SAN ANTONIO – The University of Texas at San Antonio announced that a Mexican American Studies professor launched a course on the Queen of Tejano, Selena Quintanilla-Perez, that will be available to students in the fall.

According to an article posted by UTSA, the course is distinguished as “Selena: A Mexican American Identity and Experience,” within the Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the College of Education and Human Development.

The course was spearheaded by Sonya M. Alemán, an associate professor of Mexican American Studies. It will explore various topics relating to Selena’s career, image, music, the Spanish language and Mexican American identity.

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“This has been a dream for me for a long time because it engages the things that I already am interested in and have spent time studying, researching, writing and talking about,” Alemán said in the article.

“I can’t believe [this class] hasn’t been done yet in San Antonio. It’s almost a no-brainer,” she added.

The singer became a leader of the Tejano music world in the late 1980s and early 1990s as one of the first women to break barriers in what was then a male-dominated genre.

“Issues about race, class, gender identity,” she continued, “about the racialized experience of being a Chicana and Mexican American—I just knew that all of that could be untangled and unpacked through the lens of looking at this iconic figure. Selena embodied all of those things in some aspect of her life and career.”

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With the Selena y Los Dinos group, she earned several awards, including a Grammy for Best Mexican American Album—making her the first Tejano musician to achieve this.

Selena’s life was cut short in 1995 after being shot by Yolanda Saldívar, her former fan club president and the manager of Selena’s clothing boutiques. She was 23 years old.