Unbreakable: My Story, My Way

by Jenni Rivera

  On July 2, I turned fifteen. I wasn’t able to have the traditional quinceañera that most Mexican families have for their daughters. We couldn’t afford it. My daddy made a deal with me. I had a choice between my parents’ somehow getting the money to pay for a quinceañera, or my getting a car later when they could afford it. Of course I went for the car (which I never got). Meanwhile, my celebration was to dress up in my fanciest dress and take a ride, top down, in my dad’s old convertible.

  I felt like a princess sitting on top of that beat-up car, cruising with my daddy, my hero, through the streets of Long Beach. I now realize this was my daddy’s way of confirming to me that I was, as he always called me, not the princess, but “la Reina de Long Beach.” I was so content and happy.

  However, my daddy wasn’t too happy when the ride was over. I told him that since I was now “of age,” Trino wanted to come over and talk to him about officially dating me. Back in those days, the custom was for boys to meet with a girl’s parents and ask for permission, face-to-face, to date their daughter. I thought it was so manly of Trino. Although I had been “seeing” Alfredo previously, my parents okayed Trino’s request, and I considered this to be my first true relationship. Actually, he became my first true everything. I was perfectly convinced that he was “the love of my life.” ¡Pobre mensa!

  One day, during “visitation time,” my father caught Trino and me kissing under the avocado tree. I guess that must have been hard for him to see. When I came in the house, my father stopped me at the dining-room table before I went into my bedroom. “¡Janney, si te va a chingar! This motherfucker is going to screw you!” he told me. Daddy knew that, at age twenty-one, Trino’s intentions were not on the same level as my teenage desires.

  That September I started high school at Long Beach Polytechnic High. Even though it wasn’t in the best neighborhood, everyone I knew wanted to go to Poly High, “the home of scholars and champions.” My brother Pete had graduated from there in June, Gus had attended temporarily (before getting kicked out for punching a teacher). So had baseball player Tony Gwynn and tennis legend Billie Jean King, among many other famous alumni. When Lupillo was there, a few years later, Snoop Dogg and Cameron Diaz were also students. Of course we didn’t know any of them would become such huge stars then. One day, I thought, they will say that Jenni Rivera went here too.

  I was doubly excited to go to Poly because it meant I would be reunited with all of the friends I’d left behind at Stephens Junior High when I got kicked out. Finally, I would be able to hang with all the homeys, the Mexicans, Samoans, Filipinos, Guamanians, blacks—all of those people who were just like me: a minority. We would kick it together at lunch, or in the middle of periods, and after school, since during the day I didn’t have any classes with my friends. I was in the “nerd classes,” as they put it. The only class I shared with a few of them was band. I played clarinet and reached first-clarinet status for the Long Beach Unified School District. I was getting straight A’s in all of my “nerd classes” and looking forward to everything that high school had to offer.

  But in November everything came to a stop.

  The story begins on a warm September night. Trino and I, and our chaperone, my younger brother Pupi, went to a drive-in movie to watch Prince’s Purple Rain. Halfway through the movie, Trino sent Pupi to the snack bar to get popcorn and candy. It happened right there in the back of his 1979 Monte Carlo. I can’t say he forced me because, obviously, I enjoyed feeling his touch, but I got scared and asked him to pull out before he had completely penetrated me. I figured since I didn’t feel anything, nothing had happened. In reality, everything had happened. November came around and I still hadn’t gotten my period. I wondered if I could have gotten pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Was that still possible? I was so naive and stupid. Or maybe I was just in denial. Yes, I had learned about sex and pregnancy in health class, but I did not want to face the truth. It couldn’t be. Wasn’t it supposed to feel good and be an unforgettable experience like what I’d heard all the girls talk about at school? Not in my case. Not a chance in my crazy life. I had become pregnant from the precum.

  I was in a folkloric dancing class with Patty, my brother Gus’s girlfriend and now wife. One afternoon I didn’t show up and Patty asked Gus where I had been. I had gone to a clinic to get a pregnancy test. When I came home that afternoon, Gus wanted to know where I had been during dance class. I had no choice. I had to tell him. He broke down in tears when he heard the news. “How can it be? How can you do this to our family? This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, Janney.” He told me I had to tell Pete. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t face him. I left the house before he came home from work that night.

  Soon after, I sat with my mother and gave her the horrible news. It was a great disappointment to her and an extremely sad moment for a fifteen-year-old girl such as me. I didn’t know then that Lupe, who was twelve at the time, had been sitting in my bedroom, listening to the whole conversation. As was customary in Mexican culture in those days, I wasn’t going to be able to live at home anymore. I would have to move in with Trino and we would have to get married. My mother was scared of what my father might do, so she had me leave before he got home. I had to pick up my clothes and whatever belongings I was going to take with me to my new home while my little brother and sister Juan and Rosie were watching. They were too young and innocent to know what was going on, but Lupe knew exactly what was about to happen. After I gathered my things in a black plastic trash bag, I gave my angry mother a kiss and hug good-bye, and I headed out the door and toward the driveway where the father of the child I was carrying awaited.

  I took one step out of the front door of my childhood home, and then Lupe stormed out of my bedroom crying, screaming, pleading with my mother not to let me go. “No, Mom!” he sobbed. “Please don’t make her go. I don’t want to be here without my sister. She can stay in her room and the baby can stay with us in the garage. It will be okay.” He was inconsolable. My mother looked at him and began to cry as she brought her hands to her face. She couldn’t say a word. Lupe wouldn’t give up. He grabbed me tightly by the arm, looked me in the eye, and begged, “Please stay with me, Janney! Please don’t go!” I’ll never forget the look on his face, the fear in his voice, his words, and the rivers of tears that rolled down his cheeks. As I type these words, I am crying remembering how badly he tried to hold me back on the night that changed my life forever. Did he, at the age of twelve, sense the kind of situation in which I would soon be living? Did he have a premonition about how my life would be with this man? I didn’t know, but sometimes I think my brother sensed that this man would be at the root of the Rivera family’s most tragic and painful experience.

  I dropped my bag on the ground to hug him. I continued crying as I kissed him good-bye. I picked up my belongings and walked over to Trino. I left Lupe crying at the front door of our house in Long Beach. I left my baby sister and brother with no clue as to what was going on. I left Pete and Gus so disappointed and heartbroken. And I left my mother, who was so angry and hurt that she could barely speak. I got into the beige Monte Carlo that would drive me to his family’s home in Wilmington, the city I once lived in as a little girl, and I began a life nobody would have hoped for “the Reina de Long Beach.” Years later I found out that when my father came home from work that day and asked where I was, my mom told him I had run away with Trino. Dad was so upset, and for the next three days he continually asked Mom if I had called. On the third day she told him the truth. He went into his bedroom to turn on the radio, and for the first time in a long time it was tuned to his Spanish station. I hadn’t been there to change it. He cried that night as the music played, for he knew that I was gone forever. Life would never be the same for our entire family. It certainly wouldn’t be the same for me.

  Trino and I were living in the garage in the back of his family’s house on Blinn Avenue in Wilmington. He was the only man in a house full of women. The thing was, his mother and all his
sisters hated me. They all thought I wasn’t good enough for him because I was an American girl. In their eyes all American girls were whores, and Trino should have married a Mexican girl from their ranch. They treated me badly, but that was nothing compared to the shit Trino put me through.

  Our garage apartment became the boxing ring for the many verbal and physical fights we would have during our eight-year relationship. Those walls would witness the first tears I shed as a married woman and the tears that would continue to flow for years to come. He had only brought me to live with him because he wanted to show everyone he was a responsible man and he didn’t want to publicly disgrace me and my family. But Trino insisted that the baby was not his. He didn’t believe the story the doctors gave us. In his mind, I couldn’t possibly be pregnant without our fully “doing it.” Not only that, he said no woman of his was going to continue to attend school. Trino wanted me to drop out and stay home and be a full-blown housewife. “What about my grades and my education?” I asked. “What about my future and how important it is to accomplish something and be my family’s pride and joy?”

  “That’s done and over with,” he responded. “I’m already doing enough by having you here after you slept with someone else and got yourself pregnant. I won’t put up with my woman going to school as if she were still a normal teenager. That’s not the way it happens in my family, and that’s not the way it’s going to be with me.”

  I couldn’t believe it. What the hell had I gotten myself into? As the days went on, I kept insisting, thinking I could convince him to change his mind. I couldn’t. Instead, I learned what it felt to be slapped in the face by a man. “Oh no, you didn’t, motherfucker!” I yelled at him as soon as he did it. I was fucking pissed. I immediately fell back into my tomboy ways and did what I had been trained to do: I fought back.

  “I ain’t scared of you, you little bitch,” I said. “I’ll fuck you up!” Obviously, I couldn’t do so. He was stronger than me. That was not the last time he slapped me in the face. It happened more times than I would like to admit. But I’d enjoy getting back at him when I’d catch him off guard. I would wait until he was asleep and beat his ass. This was the way our relationship went for years to come. The women in my family used to tell me, “You aren’t supposed to do that. You are supposed to let them hit you.” My nana was this old-school, religious little lady, and our grandfather used to hit her while she just looked down at the ground and took it. I told her, “Fuck that, Nana. If he hits me, I’m going to hit him back.”

  Eventually I got my way after much arguing and not giving in to his macho, idiotic ways, and I took my pregnant ass to Reid High School, the continuation high school down the street. Reid specialized in educating the more troublesome students and the pregnant teenagers. In addition to my regular academic classes, the teachers there would prepare me for childbirth.

  I’m glad I persisted, because at that school I learned about what was going on in my pregnant body. Ms. McFerrin, my home-economics and child-development teacher, would always remind me that I had to be a happy pregnant girl. She said, and actually showed me in the different textbooks, that a human being’s personality is formed in the womb. She assured me that what I put the fetus through during pregnancy would mold my child’s character for life. I believed her and later had full proof that it was true.

  Three months after I left my parents’ house, they were begging me to move back. Despite life with Trino being a living hell, I wouldn’t do it. They had kicked me out and I was too proud and stubborn to turn around and forget what had happened. No, I was going to stick it out, I was going to make things work. I was going to be a gangster wife, just like my mommy.

  Our first daughter, Janney (later to be nicknamed Chiquis), was born on June 26, 1985, six days before my sixteenth birthday. Despite Trino’s accusations, she looked just like him. I brought her home to my parents’ house on July 1 during Rosie’s fourth birthday party. They were about to cut the cake when I walked in holding this beautiful green-eyed baby. Rosie was pissed. She had always been my baby and was not too happy that she was being replaced. I promised her that I would never leave her. I assured her that she was still my baby too.

  Everyone fell in love with Chiquis, especially her Tía Rosie.

  Trino and I moved into the back house on my parents’ lot so my mother could help me with Chiquis while I worked my shift at Kentucky Fried Chicken or went to school. Unfortunately this also meant that my family witnessed a lot of the ugly altercations between Trino and me even though I tried to keep them secret.

  I gained eighty pounds during the pregnancy, and Trino told me I was now too fat to be his woman. He was constantly calling me names and humiliating me about my looks. I felt so ugly, fat, and worthless, but I never wanted to let anyone else know this. In my family they always called me “unbreakable,” and I never wanted to shatter this image of myself. On the outside I kept my head up and maintained my tough-girl image. However, inside I was dying. Because I wanted nothing more than to shut Trino up, I began fad dieting and had lost all the excess weight about a year and a half after Chiquis was born. But then he became jealous and obsessive. I just couldn’t win.

  By the last few days of January 1987, Trino and I were living in a trailer home we had purchased in Carson. I was working as a cashier at Video One on Willow Street. This was during the time of the VHS craze, and the place was always full of customers, many of them men. One day I received a bouquet of flowers at work. I stupidly thought it was a message from Trino trying to make up after yet another fight. When he came to pick me up that night, I jumped in the car and gave him a kiss, thanking him. In the blink of an eye he slapped me across the face and the flowers flew out the window. That night, I didn’t even try to fight back. Instead, I cried myself to sleep and felt myself falling deeper into a depression. I never did find out who sent me those flowers.

  The following day I skipped school, but went to work as usual. We needed the $3.75 an hour and I didn’t want to be irresponsible. Trino harassed me that evening by calling the video store nonstop. As the phone calls increased, my boss, Kim, a Korean businessman who was demanding and unkind, started to get upset. I was working with my friend Veronica, and each time the phone rang, we grew more anxious. I didn’t want to take any more shit from Kim or from Trino’s dumb ass. Remembering the slap across the face from the night before and the new accusation that I was sleeping around, I decided to go forward with what had been on my mind. I had been having suicidal thoughts.

  I said to myself, “This is it. I can’t take it anymore. I need to get away from this man. I love him, but he hurts me too much.” I desperately wanted to end the relationship, but I also wanted to be like my mother. I wanted to stay with him and make it work for my daughter’s sake, for my own stupid pride, and the old-fashioned belief that I should belong to the same man for the rest of my life. Just like my mommy.

  I debated the issue for a long time; I thought about my daughter, my parents, my brothers and sister, and then I thought about myself. I don’t remember ever having been so selfish before. During my break, I went to the Alpha Beta Supermarket, which was a couple of doors down from Video One. I bought as many over-the-counter drugs as I could afford and returned to the video store. I walked in, kissed Veronica on the cheek, and headed straight to the bathroom. There, in the Video One restroom, I downed every single pill in those seven containers, a mixture of everything they had in stock that day. Before I lost consciousness I felt the tears roll down my cheeks. I whispered to the tile floor, “I’m sorry, Mommy, I’m sorry, Daddy.”

  When I opened my eyes, I was in a bright, white room. It smelled sterile and clean, and I could hear people running back and forth in the hallway. Then I turned to see my parents, and I will never forget the sadness and grief on both of their faces. My mommy cried while my daddy tried, as usual, to show his strength. A heavy teardrop fell down his face as he forced a smile. “You’re okay, mija.” I didn’t know if he was trying to comfort me
or if he was trying to convince himself. “Everything is going to be okay,” he whispered. “We’re going to take care of you. We’re going to get you right.”

  “Don’t ever do this to me again, mija,” my mother sobbed. I began to cry too when I realized what I had done.

  They didn’t ask me why. They didn’t interrogate me. They didn’t want to make me feel worse than I already did. I didn’t say anything either. I promised my mother, silently, that I would never do it again.

  The next day I was discharged from Pacific Hospital in Long Beach with the order to be admitted into the Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center in Downey. My father’s medical insurance wouldn’t pay for my expenses at the hospital or at the rehab center. Although my parents never told me, I think they knew that I was losing my childhood warrior spirit. Indeed, I was. I spent two weeks at Los Amigos while my daughter stayed with my parents. As the youngest patient there and the only one to have attempted suicide, I received quite a bit of attention from the other patients, most of whom were suffering from drug and alcohol abuse. The staff had heard about my success in school and that I was a teen mother. They made it a point to rebuild my self-esteem and to make sure I knew how much I had going for me. Trino never showed his face while I was there.

  At Los Amigos I first heard the serenity prayer: “Dear God, please grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

  On the day I was discharged, I silently repeated that prayer to myself on the way back to my parents’ house. My brother Pete was driving, my mother sat in the passenger seat, and I sat in the back. Pete kept looking at me through his rearview mirror as “Lean on Me” played on the radio. I felt ready to face the world. I was ready for a fresh start, and I had a new outlook on life. I was finally determined to leave Trino for good.