Desprecios translates to "scorn," "contempt," or "disdain." It's a powerful noun that describes the feeling of being looked down on or considered worthless by someone else.
This word is the key to the entire song, as it appears in the title, "Tus Desprecios." Selena sings, "Tus desprecios son los que mi corazón están matando" (Your acts of contempt are what's killing my heart), perfectly capturing the deep pain of being rejected by a loved one. Learning this word helps you express a more complex and intense emotion than just sadness.
Heartbreak has never sounded so catchy. In “Tus Desprecios,” Selena pours her heart into a story of one–sided love, painting each cold shoulder and unanswered “I love you” as a sharp dagger. The lyrics follow a lover who feels every shrug, every dismissal, slowly “killing” her heart. She tries everything to win back affection, yet finds herself stuck in a painful tug-of-war: when she says “here,” her partner says “there”; when she offers a kiss, she only gets turned away.
The song becomes a bittersweet anthem about how indifference can chip away at even the strongest romance. Day by day, the relationship fades, not because of one dramatic fight, but through a drip-feed of neglect. Selena’s heartfelt delivery turns this emotional struggle into a relatable lesson: love needs reciprocity. Without it, even the deepest feelings can wither, leaving only the sting of rejection and the echo of what once was.
Selena Quintanilla-Pérez grew up in Lake Jackson, Texas, fronting her family's band, Selena y Los Dinos, with her brother A.B. writing the songs and playing bass and her sister Suzette on drums. She was raised speaking English, and her father drilled the Spanish lyrics into her phonetically, line by line, years before she was fluent in the language she sold millions of records in.
Tejano was a men's business when she took it over: she won the Tejano Music Award for Female Vocalist of the Year nine years running from 1987, and Selena Live! took the 1994 Grammy for Best Mexican-American Album. "Como la Flor", from 1992's Entre a Mi Mundo, is the song attached to her name more than any other, and Amor Prohibido (1994) put four singles at number one on Billboard's Hot Latin Songs chart, among them "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" and "No Me Queda Más". She was shot and killed in Corpus Christi on March 31, 1995, aged 23, by the former president of her fan club. Dreaming of You, the English-language crossover album she had been recording, was released that August and entered the Billboard 200 at number one.