REQUIEM FOR A LATIN STAR

For five days they lined up by the thousands, weeping, leaving flowers, spray- painting messages, even scraping blood from the concrete outside of room 158 at a nondescript Days Inn in Corpus Christi, Tex. It was there, on March 31, that the Grammy-winning Mexican-American singer known simply as Selena was shot to death, allegedly by Yolanda Saldivar, 32, a former nurse who had founded the singer's fan club. The deadly shot to her shoulder killed Selena Quintanilla-Perez two weeks before her 24th birthday. It was a shocking and brutal end to the life and career of the undisputed queen of Tejano music, who, insiders believed, was destined to equal that success with mainstream audiences. ''Selena was not merely forging an exceptional career, she was defining a new genre as uniquely American as Delta blues or New Orleans jazz,'' says Cameron Randle, a VP at Arista/Texas, which specializes in Tejano, a modern version of a traditional, accordion-based Tex- Mex sound. ''There's every indication she would have been as enormously popular as (fellow Latinos) Jon Secada and Gloria Estefan.'' Born in Lake Jackson, a blue- collar town near Houston, Selena began singing publicly at age 6 with her family's Tejano group, which started playing family weddings, then turned professional by the time she was 9. In 1989, EMI signed her own band, Selena y Los Dinos (Selena and the Guys), which included elder siblings Suzette and A.B. Jr. and future husband Chris Perez (they wed in 1992). Fame came quickly, culminating in a Grammy for 1993's Selena Live. At the time of the murder, her most recent album, Amor Prohibido (''Forbidden Love''), had sold over 500,000 copies in the U.S., and its fourth single, ''Fotos y Recuerdos'' (''Photographs and Memories''), was No. 4 on the Latin charts. In all, her five albums sold an estimated 3 million copies worldwide. In concert, Selena's sexy bustiers and taunting, pouty smiles earned her the nickname ''the Tex-Mex Madonna.'' The personal image-that of a wholesome, married woman devoted to her family-was considerably tamer. ''What I do on stage, you won't catch me doing off stage,'' she explained last fall. ''Deep down I'm still kind of timid and modest. On stage, I let go.'' That abandon, spotted at a 1990 San Antonio show, inspired Saldivar to start the fan club. And when membership grew to 9,000 in four years, Selena was impressed enough to make Saldivar her employee, in charge of finances for the club and two boutiques that sell the singer's clothing line. Several weeks ago, Abraham, Selena's father and manager, began suspecting Saldivar of embezzlement. The singer went to the Days Inn to fire her; instead she was killed. Which leaves Selena's fans with sadness, frustration, and little else: six songs for her first English-language album, which she was recording; a small part as a mariachi singer in the film Don Juan DeMarco; and a collaboration with David Byrne on ''God's Child,'' a song for the upcoming film Blue in the Face. ''(Selena) was about to take center stage as the first Tejano performer to attempt a full-scale crossover,'' says Randle. ''And she was robbed of that opportunity.'' *