Local music star dead at 74

McALLEN — Enriqueta “Queta” Treviño, a popular singer in the 1960s and ‘70s, died Friday after a long illness. She was 74.

Treviño and her sister, Beatriz “Cookie” Barrera, were known as “Queta y Cookie Las Rancheritas” and performed throughout the Rio Grande Valley and the rest of the United States, as well as Mexico and even Vietnam.

Barrera, 68, remembers how much her sister loved being at the microphone.

“She loved being in front of an audience,” Barrera said. “It just gave her a lot of pleasure to bring happiness to the audience.”

Barrera remembered the United Service Organizations tour she and her sister took to Vietnam, where they performed at 28 camps in 18 days.

“That was the most unforgettable experience of our lives,” Barrera said. “Just the look on the soldiers’ faces … that was payment enough for us.”

Treviño also hosted a television show on Sunday mornings called El Bego Show on which she interviewed guests and had musical performances.

“One of the things they loved about her was she hosted the show but she was never the star of the show,” said her son, J.P. Treviño. “Her guests were always the star of the show.”

He also remembered fondly how she would close the show each Sunday.

“Her signature farewell always offered her wishes of the best and the most beautiful that God has created to always cross her listeners’ paths,” J.P. Treviño said in a written statement, “and her hope was that His light would be ever-shining in everyone’s home.”

Queta Treviño stopped hosting the television show in the 1970s and retired from singing in 1980, said J.P Treviño. Years later, though, people still wanted to book “Las Rancheritas.”

“I have a recording of my mother on the radio,” J.P. Treviño recalled. “She’d just gone back to radio four and a half years ago. She was interviewing Country Roland and she told him, ‘I have felt such an emptiness all these years that I was away from the microphone.’”

Her return to radio lasted about four months until she became ill.

“My mother was very healthy for the first 71 years of her life,” J.P. Treviño said.

Barrera will always remember how close she was to her sister.

“It seemed like all I had to do was think and she would do it, and all she had to do was think and I would do it,” she said. “We just loved being together talking and singing.”

There will be no formal funeral arrangements for the beloved singer, said J.P. Treviño.

“Actually, my mother requested that there be no ceremony whatsoever,” he said. “She was just a very, very humble lady. And she wanted nothing done. We suggest if you want to do something, just be kind to somebody else in her name.”