Luis Miguel Ramirez always had a north star in life. From an early age, he knew he wanted to model his future around the life of the Queen of Tejano: Selena Quintanilla.
“She was just a role model for me of where I wanted to kind of take my life. She was like the blueprint,” he said.
Growing up in a Mexican-American household in Texas, Ramirez was surrounded by both English and Spanish speakers, but he hadn't learned Spanish by the time he got to high school. To communicate with his abuela, who only spoke Spanish, Ramirez followed Selena’s footsteps and learned Spanish through music.
“I remember when I graduated from high school, we were having dinner at my graduation, and I'm talking to my grandmother in Spanish, and she was just super impressed,” he said. “She was like, where did this come from?”
Many years later, Selena continued to inspire him to craft a curriculum that would make learning Spanish fun and engaging for his high school class. Ramirez built his masters thesis at the University of Salamanca in Spain around that curriculum. But Selena’s reach is limited in Europe, and convincing his advisers in Spain to let him base his curriculum on the Tejano singer wasn’t easy.
“For [my adviser] it was more like ‘Oh, she can motivate the language learner in the classroom.’ And that really got him to kind of see, OK, she has this great body of work,” Ramirez said.
Ramirez said the curriculum helped motivate his students, particularly the ones that hadn't engaged with his class before he introduced Selena in lessons. Outside of the classroom, Ramirez has used Selena’s career as a muse in his own musical career, first as the frontman of Son de Rey, and now as his musical alter ego Miguel St. Michael.
“I think Selena was just the first kind of spark to kind of push me to go see what was out there,” he said.
Throughout his musical career, he has performed in Selena inspired outfits, and he regularly covers some of her biggest hits.
“I'm very inspired to create my own pieces and whatnot because of what I learned from her, because of her style, because she knew how to construct outfits for the stage, different fabrics, different kinds of sequins, rhinestones, things like that to wear.”
Ramirez is performing as Miguel St. Michael at Northwest Hills United Methodist Church on April 12.
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