“Why are you being so hard on me?” I demanded tearfully. But what I didn’t understand at the time was that my mother was just twenty-nine years old and already had four kids. She was still very young and having trouble dealing with everything that life had thrown on her plate.
“You didn’t come into this world with a damn instruction manual, Chiquis! How the hell am I supposed to understand you?” she would yell when she just couldn’t take it anymore, holding back tears of her own. “I never acted like that, so I don’t know why you do.”
There were so many things that we didn’t understand about each other. Like the first time she kicked me out of the house, for example. I was fourteen, and right in the middle of finals during my freshman year at Jordan High School in Long Beach. During finals week, school was only half a day long, but instead of calling my mother, I went across the street to have a burger with some friends. After that, I went to the gas station where my stepfather would pick me up, always right at two thirty.
As soon as I got in the car, Juan handed me the phone.
“Chiquis, when you get home, don’t you move. Just wait until I get there. You’re in deep shit.” It was my mother on the end of the line, cold and demanding.
“But, Momma!” I tried to explain.
“I don’t want to hear it!” she screamed into the phone, ignoring my protest, and hung up.
“Your mom saw the other students heading home early and called the school. She knows you left at noon today,” Juan informed me on the drive home.
When we arrived, Juan went straight to the garage to work on his cars and hide out from the coming storm. I didn’t know what to do, so I pretended to fall asleep on the couch to avoid facing her when she returned home.
Bam! Slam! And then her very calm voice:
“You want me to whoop your ass, or do you want a different punishment?”
I didn’t answer. I was terrified. My mother wasn’t one to beat around the bush. She was as sweet and loving as she was strict and drastic. Filled with the anger that often characterized her, she grabbed a pair of massive scissors in one hand and a lock of my hair in the other, and then . . . snip, snip, snip! My hair began to fall by the fistful. And so did my tears.
Needless to say, at fourteen years old, my hair was my life! It was my personality, my pride and joy, what distinguished me from the other girls in my class. A magnificent mane, shining, coffee-colored, with soft and silky waves. My hair! The longest strand I had left among the patchy and raggedy hatchet job was two inches! I looked like I had mange.
“Now put on some shoes and get out of my house, bitch,” she said, leaving the scissors on the table as she turned and walked away. That was the ruthless Judge Jenni. I decided I’d better just shut up and leave.
I laced up my sneakers, threw up the hood of my jacket to cover my shame and bolted out of there. It was around five or six in the evening.
Juan was still in the garage with the door open.
“Show your father what I just did to you!” my mother shouted from the front door,
I stood there in the front yard and pulled off my hood. And poor Juan started to cry. He really did love me, and it hurt him to see me like that. I think he also dreaded the cold-bloodedness that my mother could display from time to time.
I saw my mother’s face growing angrier at the sight of Juan crying, and I just took off. I didn’t want to get my stepfather in any more trouble. As I was running away down the sidewalk, I heard the fight starting.
“Are you crazy? Why would you do such a thing?” Juan demanded.
“Because I’m not to be fucked with.”
Poor Juan. It was already too late. He was about to catch hell himself for having stuck up for me.
A few blocks down, I stopped at a pay phone and called one of my girlfriends from school. She told me I could crash at her place for a couple of weeks, at least until exams were through.
Two days later, a few other friends told me that my grandma was going from door to door like a crazy woman trying to find me, and that she was sick with worry. I called her and she begged me to come home to her house. And that’s where I spent the entire summer of 2000. That’s how I found myself back in my true home: the one that smelled of beans and Pine-Sol. I couldn’t have ended up in a better place. A week after I arrived there, I turned fifteen years old.
For Latinas all over the world, your fifteenth birthday—your quinceañera—is the most important day of your life, after your wedding day. You can’t have one without a big party, a mariachi band and a limo ride—unless, of course, you’re celebrating in the kitchen with your grandma Rosa, who bought a small cake, and your tía Rosie, who loaned me some of her clothes. After dinner, I stared at the green phone hanging on the wall until well after midnight. It never rang.
Happy birthday, mija! I imagined my mother’s voice in my head. But that phone didn’t ring for me for two long months. It was the first time that my beloved mother had gone that long without speaking to me. The second would be many years later, but that occasion would have a very unexpected ending.
Feliz fifteen, I said to myself as I turned out the light and lay down to dream about long dresses, boys asking me to dance and all my friends dying of envy. It was then that I remembered that my mother never had a quinceañera party either. Back then, my grandfather was barely earning enough to feed six kids and keep a roof over their heads. Still, Grandpa Pedro—with all the love in the world—found a way to take her out to dinner and to drive her there in a convertible. Aaaah! Further proof that we never had any luck with this Mexican tradition. Not at all.
Seven days later, it would be my mother’s birthday. Mine is on June 26, hers is July 2 and Tía Rosie’s is one day later, on the third. Normally, it was a week full of fiestas for the Riveras. But not that time.
Early that morning, I sent a fax to her office that read, Happy Birthday Momma, te quiero mucho.
Damn machines. Total silence. Years later, it would be Twitter that would fall silent during our fights.
Meanwhile, the slow summer days dragged on with nothing to do at my grandparents’ house. I gained a ton of weight! I was feeling so depressed about losing my beautiful hair, my mother and my siblings that I started gorging myself there, in the kitchen that was always supplied with handmade tortillas.
My tío Lupe, who had started his singing career as Lupillo Rivera but had yet to earn enough to buy a new car, saw me as depressed as I was and said, “C’mon! Get in the car . . . I’m tired of seeing that stupid look on your face.”
Lupe took me to a salon run by a few black women and paid $1,200 out of his own pocket to have them weave some braids into what was left of my hair. I picked the brown and blond ones, because I wanted to look like the singer Brandy. I sat on that hairdresser’s chair for two whole days, from sunup to sundown. What a way to suffer, my God! But I managed to endure the torture without a complaint. I was so grateful to my tío Lupe for the beautiful gift, because I never would have started tenth grade with that awful, short hair.
Then, one morning, as I was fixing up my new Brandy-style look, my mother showed up at my grandma’s house as if nothing had happened. She walked up to me, grabbed me by my muffin top bulging out over the top of my jeans and said, “Grab your things. It’s time to come home.”
I didn’t ask, and I didn’t protest either.
Once we got in the car, she didn’t say, Sorry, I love you, or anything like that. We both sat there in silence, watching the other cars go by.
That’s how we reconciled. With the muffin top!
“As soon as we get home, I’m getting rid of that ridiculous mop of hair, I’m putting you on the Zone Diet, and that’s that,” she warned me sternly.
“Okay Momma,” I replied, trying to hide my immense joy. I knew I had finally regained my beloved mother. I didn’t even care that she was about to start torturing me with her demands, her proteins and her carbohydrates.
Three days later, I started school with
my short hair that she brushed up for me. Everyone was whistling at me during class, and I managed to lose the muffin top in a matter of weeks. That was the skinniest I’ve ever been in my entire life!
Jenni the Personal Trainer would even regulate the amount of water I could drink, and would make me dance in the garage for thirty minutes every day wrapped up in a trash bag. Wow. Happy Fifteenth, Chiquis!
Life went back to normal at our house in Compton. I went from fifteen to sixteen, and fell in love with a guy named José. At home, I was forbidden to have a boyfriend, and—though I liked boys and was a total flirt—I didn’t dare go out with any of them. My secret still terrified me. What if someone tried to kiss me and found out what had happened? My life would be over!
José managed to overcome my fear. He was a rebel without a cause. Funny. Sympathetic. He dazzled me with his style and his personality. He got me to skip school. He was passionate about the famous street races in Compton.
And that’s how I spent my sweet sixteen: watching the street races from the sidewalk, my sweaty hand gripping José’s amid the deafening roar of the engines. The tricked-out cars burning rubber while the bets were placed, and the music of Notorious B.I.G. bumping in the background: “You know very well who you are . . . Don’t let ’em hold you down, reach for the stars . . .” And then we all scattered at the sound of police sirens. Nobody wanted to spend the night in jail. We were the coolest kids in Long Beach, if only for a few hours.
However, when I was with José I always feared that he would find out what happened with my father. That fear was ever present in my life. Whenever we were together, he would try to kiss me; I was scared, but at the same time I liked it. I just let him hold my hand. I agonized, thinking I was dirty and used. What if he finds out? I thought to myself every time he tried to get to first base. Poor José. I think he could sense my fear, and after I stopped him a few times, he never tried again. Of course, after failing to hit a home run with me, he lost interest and soon enough left me for another girl. That’s the game you play at that age. But I am forever grateful to him for those nights at the street races, when for a few hours my fears were silenced by the revving of engines on those industrial streets.
8.
I AM THE AIR FORCE
For years, before my mother and I started having our disagreements, I was her biggest fan. “Who’s that?” asked one of the boys in my class, pointing to a picture I had on the front of my binder.
“My momma. She’s gonna be as famous as Selena one day,” I replied, with all the confidence in the world.
In the picture, my mom was posing in tight jeans and a sexy fuchsia top.
“Yeah, right!” he joked. “The great Jenni Rivera. Ha! That’ll be the day!”
“Dumbass!” I yelled, and shoved him hard. I grabbed my books and walked away with my head held high, my ponytail swinging from side to side.
I had just started sixth grade, and we were living in the house on South Keene Avenue in Compton that my mother had worked so hard to buy when she was on her own. And, for the first time, my momma had talked with grandpa about recording some of the songs she had been writing herself, somewhat in secret. I was her number one fan. Dreaming together was fun, even if the rest of the world was mocking that poor single mom with all those kids.
One night, watching the Grammys on TV, Momma said, “What if I get serious about trying to sing?”
“¡Sí, sí, sí!” Jacqie and I encouraged her.
“You’re gonna win a Grammy, Momma!” Mikey chimed in, excitedly.
Back then, Tío Lupe was just getting to be known and our reality was a very different one from the days of glamour and fame that were to come.
At school, I got made fun of because I wore hand-me-downs from my mother that were worn-out and didn’t fit. At home we had tortillas with salt and beans for lunch and cereal for dinner. A poor man’s menu, though we—in our innocence—didn’t even notice it. Things got so bad that once, for a few months, my mother, the fighter, had to apply for benefits from the WIC program for women, infants and children. That was our reality. The odd jobs at the office weren’t enough, and real estate sales had fallen off after the housing bubble burst in the mid-nineties.
I think the first time I realized that we were officially poor was Christmas of 1996. When I got home from school one day that December, I could see some lights through the window of the house. I ran inside to discover that the tree that my mother had lovingly placed next to the TV was no more than two feet tall, and that you could count the number of ornaments on one hand.
Yikes . . . there’s not even enough space under that shrub to put a single present, I thought sadly.
I think that Christmas—with the beans, the cereal and that scrawny little tree—was the point when my mother decided that getting onstage would be the only way to turn things around. And why not? My tío Lupe was a performer, and he wasn’t doing too badly for himself. Even my tío Juan was recording his own songs. My momma was just as much of a Rivera as they were, and music was the milk they were raised on.
Without waiting any longer, my mother got down to work and recorded “Las Malandrinas,” though the song wouldn’t become a hit until some years later. She spent the next few months performing here and there, but suddenly—and to everyone’s surprise—she retired. Not even Juan, who had been working with her and attending all her local performances, understood what was going on.
“What got into you? Come on, Jenni, you’re good!” he’d say.
“Son of a bitch! This is just too hard. It’s a man’s world out there. I just don’t like it,” she replied. We were all astonished, but that’s all she told us, and we believed her.
It wasn’t until many years later, when I read her posthumous memoirs, that I found out the real reason why she hung up her microphone and almost walked away from music forever.
On one fateful night in 1997, while Juan was spending a few nights in jail for some trouble he’d gotten into, my mother was raped by a group of strangers after leaving a nightclub. This was just a matter of months before she discovered that Tía Rosie and I had been abused by my father. To this date, it pains me to write these words. Raped the same year she learned that her ex-husband, Trino, had raped her daughter and her sister. Just thinking about that leaves me short of breath.
How did we miss it? Tía Rosie and I were so frightened by our own situation that we didn’t notice anything strange going on. We were all in survival mode. Plus, my mother did her best to keep it wrapped in the utmost secrecy for the rest of her life.
Now I have a better understanding of the horror I saw on her face that night when she was sitting in the middle of a darkened room with a knife in her hand, waiting for my father to be arrested. Hatred and fear had been mixed and stirred together into her own private hell.
Even in the midst of all that, my unwavering mother still gave birth to our beautiful little Jenicka, and she went back to her secretarial work and selling houses without objection. Decent, hard-working, loving and unwilling to complain or give in.
With these words, I hereby apologize to my mother, because we all failed her that year. We couldn’t even begin to understand a fraction of the pain behind the tears she was shedding on that damn green sofa.
Time passed, and I—still oblivious to her secret—kept insisting: “But, Momma, singing is your calling. Let’s go, let’s go!”
We all begged and pleaded with her so much that finally—when her soul was more at rest—Jenni Rivera went looking for her scandalous “Malandrinas.” She found the song, which she had first recorded before all the misfortune, and with the help of Juan, her unconditional fan, she started shopping it around to any radio station or nightclub who might be willing to play it.
“Hey, you’re Lupillo Rivera’s sister!” they’d say. Tío Lupe already had a big hit with his song “El Moreno” and his album Puros Corridos Macizos. I loved hearing them mention my uncle. My mother did too, at first, but later she grew tired of it
. Who would ever take her seriously in the all-male world of corrido and banda music if she was just this guy’s sister? We would! Us, her children. We took her very seriously.
So I’d go out on the weekends with my Jenni shirt and jean shorts to sell her posters and T-shirts at various fairs and festivals. My mother would carry little Jenicka around on her hip, and I’d lug the diaper bag, CDs and boxes, while Jacqie and Mikey handled the snacks. We were an unbeatable team!
During those last two years of high school, it became clear to me that I was born to help out my mother. I felt—and I still feel to this day—that my job was to make the dreams of my family into a reality. Because, after all, despite all the difficulty we had to face, all the arguments and tragedies, her dream was our dream. She managed—and I say this very humbly—to accomplish what she did not only because she was a great artist, but also because I stayed at home taking care of her baby chicks. My baby chicks.
There’s not always a great man standing behind every great woman. In this story, it was a daughter along with a whole family of parents, children and siblings who were ready to pitch in and help out.
By the time I’d turned seventeen, I was once again my mother’s biggest fan and her most loyal support system. I focused my time on being at home with the kids. Juan left his own job so he could accompany my mother to her shows and help manage her tours.
I’d run home from school in the afternoons to fix supper, and I’d be blasting the radio there in the kitchen. And then one day . . . bam! They’re playing “Las Malandrinas”! Oh yeah! I thought to myself as I folded the laundry, tossed out diapers and gave Jenicka a bath. Now those fools back at school will see that I’m no liar. They’re playing Jenni Rivera’s song on the Que Buena radio station!
Forgiveness Page 5