First Latin solo artist to debut at No.1 on the Billboard 200
Who
Selena
What
first first
Where
United States ()
When

Selena (USA, b. Selena Quintanilla), widely regarded as the “Queen of Tejano music”, bowed at No.1 on the Billboard 200 on 5 August 1995 with her fifth and final studio album Dreaming of You. Selena was the fourth act of primarily Hispanic descent to top the chart – after Santana (1970), Los Lobos (1987) and Cypress Hill (1993) – but the first solo artist to do so, with 331,000 first-week copies sold. Dreaming of You was released posthumously on 18 July 1995 – less than four months after her death at the age of 23.


On 13 November 2017, Dreaming of You was certified 59x multi-platinum – for shipments of 3.54 million units in the US – by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). More than 3 million copies of the album have been sold in the US.

The album includes songs in Spanish and English – among them “Amor Prohibido”, a remix of “Como la Flor”, “I Could Fall in Love” and the title track, which peaked at No.22 on the Hot 100.

In 1996, Selena won Hot Latin Tracks Artist of the Year and Female Pop Album of the Year (for Dreaming of You) at the 1996 Billboard Latin Music Awards.

Selena was on the verge of her English-language breakthrough when she was gunned down by her friend, business associate and the president of her fan club, Yolanda Saldívar, in Corpus Christi, Texas, on 31 March 1995.