Stephanie Bergara is doing it backwards. It’s not unusual for a musician to eventually move on to elsewhere in the business — be it as a manager, producer, record label executive, work with a music festival or live venue, etc. Bergara, on the other hand, worked for 10 years behind the scenes in Austin, Texas’ famously vibrant music scene before stepping out as singer/performer.

“I’ve always been a person who wanted to sing in arenas and amphitheaters, these big spaces,” Bergara says. “The reality check came when I started working in music and realized that no one really had time to teach me how to do every thing I needed to do to make my dreams come true. So what I decided to do, I’m gonna learn how to do every single thing you can do behind the scenes, so that when I’m ready to start my band, I’m not going to have to depend on anyone to help me.”

By her late teens, Bergara was working the door at local shows in Austin. She also sold merch. Handed out flyers to promote festivals. Stage-managed for live gigs.

Saying “yes” to as many small things as she could eventually led to her first full-time music biz job at High Road Touring, a California-based booking agency whose clients included acts like Robert Plant and Kaiser Chiefs. There, she learned the ins and outs of contracts and developed industry contacts.

Next, she worked in a New York based publicity firm. There, she polished communication skills, like how to present oneself in the best way during a press interview. That led to her being scouted to work for the music and entertainment division of the City’s of Austin’s economic development department, were she taught media skills to Austin-based musicians.

With the financial security of a full-time government job, she decided it was finally time to start a band in her free time. Along the way, she’d done some backing vocals but never her own thing. In 2014, she founded Bidi Bidi Banda, a tribute to the music of Selena, the late “Queen of Tejano Music” and the subject of the 1997 Jennifer Lopez-starring biopic “Selena.”

“By the time I started the band,” Bergara tells AL.com, “I knew contracts. I knew publicity. I knew we needed to have a social media presence. I knew the pieces that needed to be in place for us to get our name out there, and I knew I had tons of promoter contacts all over the country, because I’ve been doing contracts for other bands.”

That first year, Bidi Bidi Banda only played five shows or so. The setlist was only around 10 songs. But over the years, their itinerary grew to around 70 shows a year and their song list swelled to around 40 Selena songs, including audience slayers like “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” (from which the band got their name) and the heartbreaking “No Me Queda Más.”

Bergara had been a Selena fan since was around 8-years-old. She first became enamored with Selena after watching a Tejano Music Awards TV broadcast in which Selena wowed viewers not just with her music and dance moves but also the sexy outfit she wore onstage. It led to Selena being compared to Madonna, the ultimate pop provocateur.

Bergara was already a fan of dance-pop artists like Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul. But Selena “was the first person who I ever saw on television who looked like she could be in my family,” says Bergara, who is Mexican American. “She looked like she could be my cousin who lives in this house two doors down. And I was so enamored with her visually, and then she started singing and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.’”

As her fame was skyrocketing, Selena was murdered on March 15, 1994, by a friend and former employee. Bergara was in third grade choir practice when she heard the news: “I just couldn’t believe it.”

Selena’s posthumous album “Dreaming of You,” topped the U.S. albums chart and featured the English-sung hit “I Could Fall In Love.” For the Hispanic community, Selena’s passing cut as hard as the 1994 suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain hit rock fans and Tupac Shakur’s 1996 murder would later devastate rap fans.

Nearly 30 years after her death, Selena remains a huge influence in many parts of the world. But in Texas, which has a vibrant Latino population, she’s everywhere. “The music is so familiar to everyone,” Bergara says. “It’s at weddings. It’s at birthdays. It’s at backyard parties. It’s at Dallas Cowboy tailgates. It’s everywhere. I mean, Selena is queen of Texas. She’s on grocery store bags, she’s on candles, she’s on everything still to this day.”

Austin is located in central Texas, where, as Bergara puts it, “the Tex meets the Mex,” making it an ideal place to pays tribute to Selena’s music. In Bidi Bidi Banda’s early days, Bergara hand-sewed reproductions of Selena’s signature outfits to wear onstage. But she soon decided it was way more important to be accurate sonically than visually, even though some tribute acts seem to pay more attention to the latter than the former.

“One of the things that was really important to me in establishing this band,” Bergara says was taking it seriously and making sure that the music was actually good. That we weren’t up there with just me in a purple jumpsuit. Our hope is that what you will do is close your eyes and be like, ‘They’re doing it right.’”

Bergara sings nearly all the Selena songs in the original keys, something she says came naturally for her. Since she doesn’t speak Spanish, she learned the lyrics phonetically, although in the nine years she’s been singing these songs she’s learned the meaning and themes behind theme.

Playing shows with Bidi Bidi Banda, she’s experienced firsthand was Selena’s appeal went beyond her music, style, talent and race. “I’ve heard hundreds of stories,” she says. “‘My parents owned a burger restaurant and Selena came at two o’clock in the morning,’ or, ‘My mom checked Selena out at a Target one time.’ All these stories amazing stories and how about how nice she was and how good of a person she actually was.”

Bidi Bidi Banda travels to their shows by rented van for gigs in Texas and does fly-in gigs out of state. Depending on the gig, the band numbers in musicians from four to six. Along the way, they’ve been on the same bills as stars like Taylor Swift, Joan Jett, Billy Joel and De La Soul.

In 2020, the band added diversity clause in their contracts. They now only accept shows celebrating women, artists of color and the LGBTQ community.

For example, on Sept. 17 Bidi Bidi Banda will perform at Huntsville, Alabama’s Orion Amphitheater, as part of “CulturA Festival: A Celebration of Hispanic Culture, Food, and Music,” part of the city’s Women in Music Week, which starts with an 8 p.m. Sept. 15 show featuring female artists at Orion, A complete WIMW schedule can be found at womeninmusichsv.com.

“It was a statement,” Bergara says of her band’s diversity clause. “I’m on the road watching other like people who are in these marginalized groups getting underpaid and things like that or telling us telling us there’s only room for one woman on the bill or whatever.

While in Huntsville, Bergara will also be a featured speaker in a Sept. 18 career and artists development workshop at local venue The Camp. During her nearly 20 years in the music business, she helped start a COVID-relief fund that provided direct financial relief to thousands of affected members of Austin’s music industry. She also pushed that city to establish a minimum rate of $200 an hour per musician for local musicians.

Asked what cities like Huntsville that aspire to Austin’s renowned music scene and musician-friendly rep, Bergara, who was born and raised in Austin, says, “It’s ingrained in our DNA to it to consume and support live music. I remember being 5-years-old and going to festivals and seeing bands.

“Like, it’s no rare thing to go to the grocery store and see a full-blown polka band playing. And it’s always been that way. We never had to have a conversation with my family when I was growing up about supporting the arts. It’s just something we were always going to do.”

When she’s not performing or advocating for musicians, Bergara spends most of her time with her 5-year-old son, including a lot of outdoors time. By day, she works as downtown Austin’s Waterloo Greenway Conservancy event manager.

Bergara calls her East Austin home “the house that Selena built.” But soon she’ll be embarking on a solo career performing her own music, drawing from pop influences and leaning into a country-tinged sound. Moving towards a goal of being a touring musician under her own name. Her own brand.

Playing in a tribute band all those years taught lessons she feels are critical to making original music. “Write good songs,” Bergara says. “And there’s a lot to be said about artists who make their fans passionate about what they do.”

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