Unbreakable: My Story, My Way

by Jenni Rivera

  The first time he met my whole family was at Jenicka’s sixth birthday party, in October of 2003. The party was at Chuck E. Cheese’s, which isn’t a bad place to introduce a guy to your family. It keeps things light.

  Even so, my family wasn’t exactly thrilled. They wanted to know what he had to offer. Whenever my mom would meet a guy I dated, she would remember who they were according to what they gave her. One guy gave her sweet bread, so she’d ask, “Where is the guy with the bread?” And when I broke up with him, she’d say, “Oh, now who is going to give me sweet bread?” A few months later I brought a carpenter. Mom was thinking, “Oh, good, he can fix my roof.” She had the guy paint the house.

  So when my mother met Fernando, she said, “What is he going to give me?” He wasn’t working at the radio station anymore; he was working at a porn warehouse and selling the DVDs out of the back of his truck. Not exactly what Mom was looking for, I assumed. Nobody was too thrilled about my seeing him. Everyone thought I could do better, but I knew they would come around. He treated me so well and he loved me—not Jenni the singer, but Jenni the person. Eventually they saw that too. You couldn’t deny it.

  Plus, he was fun and charismatic. He won everyone over, especially my kids. The Riveras like anyone who can kick back and have a good time. That was Fernie (the nickname they all use for him). My sister would say, “Hanging with Fernie is like hanging with you. You know you’re going to get in trouble, but you know you’ll never get caught.”

  After about four or five months Fernie was everyone’s favorite, but I still hadn’t met any of his family or friends. It started to piss me off. “Are you hiding me?” I would ask him. “Are you fucking another girl?”

  “No, babe. It’s just not safe for people to know we’re together. I live in the ghetto. I have to think about my mom. You have to understand.”

  When I did meet his mother, I adored her from the first second I laid eyes on her. She is an incredible woman. She raised two sons on her own on a minimum-wage job. Her husband left her when Fernando was four, and after that she never had another man. She attends a two-hour mass every single morning, and she can put together a thrift-store outfit and make it look as if it came from a high-end department store. I called her suegra (mother-in-law) from the beginning. We shared a special bond, and I would call her to talk things through or ask her for guidance and prayers. I would also go to visit her on my own. I just loved being in her company.

  One day I guess some men saw me walking out of her house. That night, at three in the morning, five men came knocking at her door. “We want to see Jenni!” they were yelling. “My wife is dying and her last wish is to meet Jenni!”

  Fernando was at a friend’s house three blocks away when his mother called him. He sprinted to her house and found the five drunk men on his mother’s front stoop. He told them to get the hell out of there and then he called me, pissed, to tell me what had happened.

  “You see? You live up in your gated community, up in your la-la land, and I’m down here dealing with all the shit. Do you see?”

  After that I was much more careful. Together we decided to keep our relationship private. He never wanted the attention and ran from a camera whenever he saw one in our presence. I wanted something to myself, something that the media could not pick apart. Because such a huge part of my life was becoming public, it felt good to have this privacy, this one element of my world that was my very own.

  About six months into our relationship Fernando got an apartment in Van Nuys, though he could barely afford it. He said he wanted us to have a place where we could be alone. We would sneak out of the balcony in the back so his neighbors wouldn’t see us. I had a key, and sometimes I would go to clean for him, leave him a cooked meal, and take his laundry back to my house so I could do it for him. One time I was climbing over the back balcony carrying his laundry bag as if I were Santa Claus. As I was lifting my leg over the railing, I heard a man’s voice say, “Jenni? Jenni Rivera?” It was the trash collector, who recognized me even though I had on sweats, a ball cap, and no makeup. “Yes,” I told him as I waved and smiled awkwardly, “it’s me.”

  That night Fernando called. “Babe, thank you! But what did you do to my bong?”

  “Your what?”

  “The glass thing that was on the counter.”

  “Oh, the flower vase! That was the dirtiest flower vase I have ever seen. It took me forever to get all the dirt out of it.”

  He loved that I was this tough ghetto girl from Long Beach, but I also had this innocent, naive side that needed to be shown the difference between a bong and a flower vase. It gave our relationship a spark.

  When my career started to take off in the fall of 2005, I was traveling a lot more and performing every weekend. I couldn’t stand to be apart from him, and my kids were crazy about him too. I asked him to move into the house in Corona with us and to join me on the road. That’s when the true craziness began.

  Fernando and I are so much alike. We are both incredibly passionate, stubborn, loving, prideful—and neither of us is known for backing down. Throughout our relationship, we loved and fought with the same level of intensity. When things were good, they were really good. There was no couple you’d rather be around. But when things were bad, they got ugly. I had been so hurt and broken down by Trino and Juan that with this relationship I was determined that it wouldn’t happen again. I was a bit hardened and I wanted to maintain the upper hand a lot of the time. But Fernando wasn’t going to let me step all over him. If I screamed at him or called him a name, he would tell me, “Don’t talk to me like that. I’ll sleep under the freeway if I have to, but don’t talk to me like that.”

  Our fights usually started over something small and stupid, but they would escalate into huge battles. We never hit each other, but we would kick down doors and break furniture. We’d get thrown out of hotels for screaming in the hallways and for wrecking the rooms. Anyone who was nearby would quickly find an excuse to leave in order to escape the drama. All of a sudden everyone would have to go to the 7-Eleven or the hotel bar.

  In every single fight, neither of us would back down and apologize. He’d pack a bag and leave for two or three weeks. I would usually be the one to reach out and call for some lame reason. “You left your white T-shirt here,” I’d say. “Are you going to come get it?” Or: “If you’re hungry, I’m cooking tonight.” That was my form of an apology, and he knew it. He would meet me halfway by saying he was sorry first, and then we would be back on as if nothing had happened.

  When we were on these breaks, we would inevitably meet other people, give out our numbers, or go on a few dates. But when we were back on and one of those random numbers called, it would start another world war and lead to another period of our not talking. So began our endless cycle of “break up to make up.”

  I never stopped loving him through any of it. When we were not speaking, I would be crying onstage and nobody knew why, but it was almost always for Fernando. I would often dedicate songs to mi pinche pelón (my baldy), and nobody knew who it was. This was the one relationship that I wanted to make work so badly, and I thought if I protected it from the media, then we might have a shot, so I never talked about him in the press. Of course, I talked about everything else, though . . .

  15

  * * *

  Two More Years

  Te prometo no dejar ninguna huella

  ninguna evidencia de que yo estuve ahí.

  (I promise to leave no trace

  no evidence that I was there.)

  —from “De Contrabando”

  My famous line to my family and to Fernando was always “two more years.” I would tell them, “I’m just going to do this for two more years, and then I’ll stay home and be normal.” But I guess “normal” was never in the cards for me.

  In 2003 and 2004 I recorded about eight songs in English because I wanted to do an English album. My father said, “You don’t want the Latinos to think, ‘Oh, look, she got famo
us and now she is leaving us.’ ” I followed his advice and instead worked on my next album, Parrandera, Rebelde y Atrevida (A Party Girl, Rebellious and Bold). When it was released in October of 2005, it immediately hit the Top 20 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart. In weeks it went gold and then platinum. I got a contract to sing at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. No other female Mexican artist had ever done that. I said to myself, “Okay, I’ll do the Kodak and then I’ll get to the Gibson and then I’ll be done. I don’t need to prove anything after that. Just give me two more years . . .”

  I did an interview with El Piolín on the Los Angeles radio station La Nueva. We were discussing my album and my upcoming concert, and after talking about some of my new songs and lyrics, El Piolín asked me who I would prefer to record a song with if I had the choice, Graciela Beltrán or Mariana Seoane. I was always the girl who didn’t hold back. If an interviewer asked me a question, I answered honestly. I’m sure any publicist would have told me to say, “I love them both, I can’t choose.” Instead I spoke from the heart and said, “From those choices, I would pick Graciela Beltrán.”

  “Why?”

  “Because for me, she has more talent.”

  “What does Mariana have?”

  “I don’t know. I think she has palancas [connections], people who help her push her career forward.”

  That comment started a huge media scandal. Obviously, Mariana heard about it. A few days later my brother Lupillo went to do an interview with El Piolín, and the station called me and put me on air to comment on Lupillo’s interview. But in reality they had a surprise for me; Mariana Seoane was waiting on the air. She was upset with me. I said, “Look, I never said you didn’t have talent. I think you obviously have charisma to be in this business, but you also have people who have supported you and helped launch you. That doesn’t mean it’s anything bad. It would have been great if I had that.” Nevertheless, she was offended. Off the air we agreed to meet to talk it out. I thought we had put it behind us after that, but I was wrong.

  Shortly after that, I was invited to sing the national anthem at “Viva Dodgers Night.” Since I have always been a huge baseball fan, it was a great honor for me. The show El Gordo y la Flaca called and asked if I could join them live on the show the next Monday to discuss my singing of the national anthem. I said of course. That Monday I was on my way to the show when I got a call telling me that Mariana Seoane was also live out of Miami on the show. I was surprised, but I was not going to back out of the interview. Lili Estephan and a guest host were doing the show that day since El Gordo de Molina was on vacation.

  Once again, they asked me about my comment about Mariana on El Piolín’s show. I defended my statement once more, but this time Mariana came back on and said I also had palancas because I had my brother Lupillo. I responded that I was the one sitting down giving the interview, not my brother. I told her that I recorded, I managed my own image, and I gave my own interviews. Nobody had ever played my music just because I was Lupillo’s sister. What I couldn’t see, because I didn’t have a monitor, was that while I was talking, Mariana was mocking me on-screen. I only had a camera in front of me. But the damage was done because my fans saw what she did. Then, all of a sudden, my image on the monitor scrambled and went to a blur. I was told that we had lost the satellite connection.

  My fans went crazy. They all thought it was intentional, and so did I. Chiquis was the most upset of all. “Why would they do that to you, Mom?” she kept asking. Everywhere I went the reporters wanted to hear my reaction about being “taken off the air” on El Gordo y la Flaca. Obviously I wasn’t going to let the whole thing die without getting the last word.

  A month later I went to Miami to promote my record live on El Gordo y la Flaca. This time El Gordo de Molina was there. They apologized left and right about what had happened with the satellite the last time. I told them I would like to dedicate a song to whoever had anything to do with cutting me off the air. I sang the verse: Este verso es pa’ tu, abuela, y los que llevan tu sangre. Agarrados de la mano, chingen todos a su madre (This verse is for you, your grandma, and your bloodline. Hold each other’s hands, and go fuck your mother). Then I stood up, took off my microphone, placed it on the table, and walked off the set.

  “Did you really just do that? Did I just see what I think I saw?” I could barely hear a word Jazmin, the talent representative from my label, was saying. I had just cursed El Gordo y la Flaca off, live, on the air. Nobody had ever done that. Ever. I told Jazmin, “Ah, well, I’m sure I’ll never be asked back on.”

  Had I gone too far? Did they deserve it? Was that a big career mistake? The truth is, I didn’t care. No self-respecting chick from the West Side of Long Beach would care about any of that. Because no self-respecting chick from the West Side of Long Beach would ever worry about what was right, what was wise, and what was responsible when it came to defending her honor.

  This event made me “the infamous Jenni Rivera.” The media talked about it every chance they could. Some people wanted me to retract my statement and apologize, but there was no way I was going to do that. I didn’t feel any remorse for what I had done, so I was not going to be a phony or a hypocrite. My fan base, instead of abandoning me, only grew stronger and more supportive.

  The night of my concert at the Kodak, October 14, 2005, I found out that it was sold out. As I pulled up to the theater, Hollywood Boulevard was swamped. As I looked at the lines of people wearing Jenni Rivera T-shirts, I got choked up.

  “Can you believe it?” I said to nobody in particular. “The nerd from the LBC sold out the motherfucking Kodak.” Not only did I sell out the motherfucking Kodak, that night the theater had the highest alcohol sales ever reported. To me that was the greatest achievement of all. Ticket sales are important, of course, but to promoters, the alcohol sales are just as important, if not more. That is how they make the bulk of their money, and so the artists who have high alcohol sales are the most beneficial to sign. And in that respect, my fans never disappointed.

  To this day I still say my concert at the Kodak was my most memorable. It was the first time I sang in a theater that big and that prestigious. Soon after, I got a contract to sing at the Gibson, which had been my goal for so long.

  “Okay,” I kept saying. “I’ll do the Gibson and then the Staples and then I’ll retire. Two more years.”

  But then “the impossible” happened. In the spring of 2006 I got my first big gig in Mexico, at a palenque in Guadalajara. (In Mexico, a palenque is a place where both cockfights and concerts are held, and in my opinion, it is also the best place to perform.) “De Contrabando,” one of the songs on my new album, had hit it big in Mexico, and all of a sudden I was known throughout the entire country. Many people told me that a singer who was not born on Mexican soil could never break into that market. People in the industry told me it was impossible, so you can imagine how excited I was to be proving them wrong once again. Though I will admit I was also a little nervous, since times were rough in Mexico, and several regional Mexican artists had recently been kidnapped or killed.

  I asked my brother Juan if he had any friends who could protect us. Juan always knows the people you need to know. When we arrived at the airport in Mexico, we were greeted by several armored cars driven by government officials, and they brought us to the palenque.

  My band and I were set up in the small circle in the middle of the palenque, and thousands of fans surrounded us. The closest fans were less than ten feet from me, and they were handing me tequila shots throughout the night as they sang along to my songs. The energy was so high and so contained, and when I finished that concert, I was buzzing on alcohol and adrenaline.

  Outside, the caravan of armored cars was waiting for us. As we drove away, we opened the moon roof in the car. I asked one of the government officials to let me see his gun. For some reason he did, and without hesitating, I stood up and shot the gun in the night air. Between shots I heard the government official say to my brother,
“What the fuck is she doing? I could be arrested.”

  Juan asked the obvious question: “Well, why the fuck did you give her the gun?”

  The next night I was scheduled to sing at another palenque in Uruapán, 160 miles southeast of Guadalajara. That morning we heard rumors that something was going to happen to me.

  Juan said, “Let’s just cancel the gig.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Is it worth it?”

  “It’s not about the money. People are coming to see me. I can’t let them down. Will you go with me?”

  “Well, shit, I don’t have a choice.”

  We drove from Guadalajara to Uruapán with thirty cop cars surrounding us. I was sitting in the middle between Juan and Hector, Chiquis’s fiancé, who served as one of my protectors. As we approached the crowded venue, Juan said, “Hector, if any shots get fired, we fall on my sister.”

  “All right,” he said. “I got you.”

  We pulled up to the doors and all I saw were machine guns everywhere.

  Juan hugged me. “I don’t know if anything is going to happen tonight. But if we are going, we are going to ride together, all right?”

  “All right, Brother. Just don’t bitch out.”

  Nothing happened that night at the palenque, but we were still on edge when we got to our hotel. Hector and Juan told me they were going to sleep outside my door. I went to bed, and they decided that they were going to get drunk so if anything happened, they wouldn’t feel it. I woke up the next morning and they were hammered.