Unbreakable: My Story, My Way

by Jenni Rivera

  When the contest was over, my daddy came and found me. He was heated. I wasn’t used to his screaming and scolding me. It was always my brothers who had to deal with that side of my daddy, never me. But, boy, did I get it that night. “I thought you said you were prepared for this, Janney. You always need to be prepared for everything you do in life. Don’t just jump into things like a fool. You ran out of there like you were scared of something. Is that what I taught you? ¿No que muy chingona? Where is the warrior in you right now? ¿Dónde estan tus huevos?” He went on and on. He didn’t stop once we got in the car. The trip home seemed endless. As we drove down the 710 southbound, I thought we would never reach the Willow Street exit.

  He wouldn’t stop. By the time we made it to the West Side, I had decided that if my singing was going to cause my father to scream at me, I didn’t want to do it anymore. I wasn’t used to this and I wasn’t going to have it. That night my father found out that not only did I have his character and personality, but his balls and attitude as well. I turned and looked at him: “I’ve never been scared of anything, Dad. Just like I’m not scared of telling you right now that I don’t ever want to sing again. I don’t want to play this music game that you play. I’m done. I promise you, I will never touch a microphone again. And I will show you that I will become something, even if my voice is not involved. You’ll see.” By the time I said those last words, I was crying. And even though he didn’t show it, I knew he was hurt. I was too. To this day he thinks it is because he yelled at me. It wasn’t. I was hurt and sad because I had failed my daddy.

  As soon as my father parked the car in the driveway, I jumped out and ran into the house and straight to my room. I didn’t even say hello to my mother, who was washing dishes in the kitchen. I cried into my pillow and I contemplated getting Pilly’s mini-radio and bumping to George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog,” just to make my father even angrier. Instead, I listened to him tell my mom what had happened. I thought the conversation was over when my mother said, “I told you, singing isn’t her thing.”

  But it wasn’t over. My father got the last words, of course. “Como chingados no. She will be back one day. I will never bother her with this singing thing again. I will never insist again. But one day, ella sola, se dara cuenta que esto es lo suyo. Her love for music is too great. Without me or anyone pushing her, eventually she will be back. I will just sit here and wait.”

  As a little girl, no matter where we were living, whether it was the apartment in Culver City, the ever-too-small homes in San Pedro and Wilmington, or the two-on-a-lot house my parents were finally able to purchase in Long Beach, there was always music. My father always had the radio turned to Radio Express, the station that specialized in playing the old-school hits of Vicente Fernández, Ramón Ayala, Pedro Infante, Javier Solís, and all the other greats of that time. My father would sing along to his favorites as he worked on the cars in the yard.

  Inside, as my mother cleaned the house, she would put on her LPs and sing along with Chayito Valdez, Chelo, Lola Beltrán, Rocío Dúrcal, and Yolanda del Río. I learned the lyrics, and at the tender age of seven I would sing along to songs about drinking to get over men and spending nights at the bar. On Sundays, I would peek into the living room when my parents were watching Raúl Velasco’s weekly show, Siempre en Domingo. A few artists stuck with me, and the way Lupita D’Alessio expressed herself vocally and physically always got my attention. I loved how Beatriz Adriana, as she sang her famous ranchera songs, made her eyes dance. I tried to imitate them in the bathroom mirror.

  My parents actually met at a singing contest when they were teenagers in Mexico. My siblings and I were constantly surrounded by the music they wanted us to carry within ourselves. We were not allowed to listen to or watch anything but Spanish music and Spanish television at home. However, the neighborhood, the barrio, and my friends introduced me to different types of music. The “homeys” would play what we considered then to be hip-hop music. We’d dance to Zapp and Roger’s “More Bounce to the Ounce,” “So Ruff, So Tuff,” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” at backyard barbecues.

  I loved to dance more than I loved to sing. Since I was seldom allowed to go out and join my friends at the neighborhood parties or go to the school dances, I would dance at home. Every afternoon I would go into my parents’ room and change the Spanish station my father had programmed on his radio to the English stations that played the music I wanted to listen to—the Sugar Hill Gang, Midnight Star, the Tom Tom Club—and that would get me dancing when my parents and brothers weren’t looking. Other times, depending on my mood, I would listen to something more mellow. I would find the stations that played Peaches & Herb, Marvin Gaye, and Diana Ross. My father and I were engaged in a permanent battle because I would always forget to change the dial back to his Spanish station.

  During the summer of 1983, when I was fourteen, I met a boy named Sergio, my first puppy love. Sergio lived on Summit and Canal, in one of the more dangerous neighborhoods on the West Side of Long Beach. He introduced me to the “oldies but goodies” that all the cholos (Mexican thugs) in the neighborhood would listen to and bump on their boom boxes and lowrider cars: Brenton Wood, the Delfonics, Mary Wells, Smokey Robinson. My dad saw me talking to Sergio on the corner of Hill and Sante Fe one day as Sergio walked me to the bus stop on the way to school. I can remember only two times during my childhood when my father hit me. He said he wouldn’t lay a hand on “la Reina de Long Beach,” but when he did, it was serious. When he came home from work that afternoon, he slapped me across the face so hard I flew across the living room. There was no way his queen would be seen with any cholos. They could be my friends, but not my boyfriends. My father warned me that if I didn’t stop seeing Sergio, he would force me to drop out of school. To me, nothing was more important than school, so that marked the end of my puppy love with Sergio, but it didn’t really matter: he had opened me up to yet another style of music, and that was good enough for me.

  At the nearly all-white Bancroft Junior High, I was introduced to yet another musical world. The gringos wouldn’t listen to the funk artists that the homeys at Stephens did. Yes, they’d listen to a bit of Michael Jackson, but everyone was a fan of the Thriller album back then. When we were on the school bus going back home, they would ask the bus driver to change the stereo dial to the pop stations, and they went crazy over the Police, Depeche Mode, and some singer named Madonna.

  During this time I met Alfredo. His brother and my brother Pete played on the same baseball team. Alfredo was my age and he went to DeMille Junior High, down the street from my new school. We stopped taking our respective school buses and would take the city bus to and from school to spend a little time together. He would always carry his Walkman and would share it with me as we sat in the back of the bus. He brought all kinds of tapes with him and introduced me to Duran Duran, disco, alternative rock, and some ridiculous, loud, screaming music that I didn’t quite understand. He said it was called “heavy metal.”

  Alfredo and I had been seeing each other for two months when I found out that he lived on the same street as Sergio. This led to a few fights and to Sergio’s stabbing Alfredo in the ribs. I saved them both the trouble of fighting for my honor because around the same time my brother Gus had seen my “rockabilly boyfriend Alfredo” macking with a girl at a quinceañera. I was heartbroken and I broke it off with him immediately. For about a day I thought it was the end of the world. But then, once again, I was happy to have been opened up to even more music through that short-lived relationship. I added Alfredo’s cassettes to the rest of the repertoire I had gathered during my childhood and teenage years, and I moved right along in search of my next great love and my next musical awakening.

  4

  * * *

  My Early Business Sense

  Cuando cumplí los quince años

  no me hicieron quinceañera.

  (When I turned fifteen years old,

  They didn’t give me a quinceañera.)<
br />
  —from “La Chacalosa”

  The summer of 1984 would change my life forever. I was excited for my birthday, not because I would get a quinceañera, but because it meant that I could finally get a real summer job. It also meant I could have my first real boyfriend, but to be honest, that was secondary in my mind.

  Money had always been scarce in our house. But my parents were both hustlers, and they passed that on to all of us children. My parents either worked in factories, owned a bar in the city of Wilmington, or sold music at a record store they owned for a short time on Santa Fe Avenue in Long Beach. After returning home from his nine-to-five job, my dad would head out to the local nightclubs with his Polaroid camera to offer clubgoers a picture for a few dollars. My mother would sell Avon or Tupperware for extra money. They never rested.

  As children, my brothers and I witnessed their struggle. It came natural for us to be like them. My brothers would collect aluminum cans from the neighborhood trash bins, and often they would take me along. We’d gather enough to make a little money, which Pete and Gus would split and give Lupe and me a little cut. Sometimes we’d offer the neighbors our lawn-trimming services. We made a little extra cash on the weekends that way. And as far back as I can remember, my parents would go to the swap meets to sell cassettes. They each had a music stand. We used to run back and forth between their stands if a customer asked for a cassette that one of them didn’t have but the other did. When I was eleven, I noticed that more people were walking through one particular section of the swap meet, and I decided we needed a third spot in that area. I asked a woman who had a stand there if I could rent a table from her and I would give her a percentage of my sales. “You don’t have to give me a percentage,” she told me. “Just play good music.”

  When I was fourteen, I convinced my dad to invest in a button machine so I could make buttons to sell at concerts. The first concert I went to was a Menudo show. The week before, I collected all my pictures of Menudo and made buttons. During the breaks or in the bathroom I would sell them. I sold an entire backpackful and made Dad proud. I would do this at many more concerts later on, and that summer I also got my first true job.

  My tía Licha, who rented the back house of our duplex, had a job at a factory in Long Beach. The main purpose of the company was to stuff women’s handbags with paper to make them look full. Tía Licha spoke to her supervisor about me, and I was hired although I was only fourteen years old. Working in that factory was miserable. The conditions were so bad and the managers were cruel to the workers, who were mostly illegal immigrants who were too afraid to speak up. I would come home smelling of plastic and tell my parents how awful it was. My father was horrified and wanted me to stop working there immediately. But my mother said I could not quit. This would teach me the value of an education, which would keep me from working such an awful job for the rest of my life.

  Later that summer, Patty, my brother Gus’s girlfriend, spoke to her boss about hiring me. Patty worked as a waitress at the Golden Star Restaurant and was sure I could do the job. I went in for an interview on one of my weekends off from the purse-stuffing job and was hired that very day. I enjoyed being a waitress. The interaction with the customers was so much fun—especially at a hamburger joint such as Golden Star, a place frequented by all types of people. Working there, I always took pride in my customer service and being recognized as a good employee. I waited on tables just as the older, more experienced waitresses did. Few people knew that I was only fifteen years old. I didn’t look my age. The tight jeans and fitted T-shirts I was now wearing made me look even older, and my curves were beginning to show more as I started to develop into a young woman. Since Golden Star was located on the Pacific Coast Highway, a busy street that connects Wilmington to Long Beach, it was not unusual to see many truckers come in for breakfast or lunch, and they were not always the loveliest customers to wait on. I learned to deal with them, although some just seemed like horny bastards to me.

  One hot afternoon in the final days of that August, work was going as usual. I was being a perfectly polite and hardworking waitress, as I always was. I noticed a man sitting at the corner table, close to the Centipede arcade game. He was glancing at me from afar with a smirk on his face. I approached his table, took his order, and walked away. When I returned with his food, he had a lustful grin on his face. He looked me up and down. Not only was he smelly and ugly, but he had a problem keeping his hands to himself. All of a sudden I felt his hand touch my rear end. I thought to myself, This motherfucker did not just grab my ass! In a split second I threw his food in his face and told him, “Grab this, pendejo.” I was fired on the spot for being disrespectful to a customer.

  I was upset about losing my job, but proud of what I had done. The summer was almost over anyway. In a couple of weeks I would be a tenth grader at Poly High School. I had saved up enough money to get me some new garras. I walked home that afternoon thinking about where I was going to shop for my back-to-school clothes and realizing how, once again, my ass had gotten me in trouble.

  I continued doing well in school that year. I wanted to make my mother as happy as my brothers did. When I got home from school, I would wash dishes, clean the house, and iron baskets of clothes. She swore I would purposely break the dishes and make a lot of racket with the pans so she wouldn’t ask me to do them anymore, but in truth I was only trying to wash them as fast as she did. She had such a great technique and I kept trying to get it down. Although my mother never knew it, I wanted to be just like her. Yes, I was a tomboy. But I also wanted to cook like her, clean like her, work like her, and someday be an excellent mother and wife . . . just like her.

  My parents would seldom let us hear their fights. My brothers and I never witnessed any physical violence at home. I never heard of any cheating or any big arguments. At times, however, I would notice that my mother’s eyes were puffy and swollen after walking out of their bedroom. I wondered what was wrong, but never dared to ask. Was she upset because money was scarce? Would my daddy dare hit her? Did she find out that he had cheated? I didn’t know. What I admired most about my mother was that no matter what, through thick and thin, she had my daddy’s back. She was a soldier for their love.

  She didn’t know it, but she was a proper gangster wife, as we used to call it in the hood. My father was her first boyfriend, her first love, the first man she gave herself to, and the man she stayed with, no matter what. She was not going to raise her children without a father. I loved my mommy’s strength and determination to make the relationship work. I vowed that when I grew up, I would be just like her. She set an example that I wanted to follow, an example that would affect my life more than I could even imagine.

  5

  * * *

  My First Love

  I never wanted to be your weekend lover.

  I only wanted to be some kind of friend.

  —from “Purple Rain”

  In the fall of 1982 I was in eighth grade at Stephens and first met the man who would later change my life. I was walking home from school with my girlfriends Ruby and Alma. They wanted to stop by the Pioneer Chicken Stand on the corner of Santa Fe Avenue and Willow Street to see if they could get a free combo meal from a friend who worked there, Trino, short for Trinidad. When we got there, he looked at me in a way that made me a bit nervous. He asked me my name as I shyly lowered my face to the ground. I looked up at his beautiful, hazel eyes lined by long, dark eyelashes. “Janney,” I responded, feeling myself turn pink in the cheeks.

  “I like your friend,” he told the girls.

  At the time he was nineteen and lived in the apartment next door to Ruby’s house on Parade Street. Ruby was my best friend and I would be allowed to visit her on the weekends or after school as long as Pupi came along with me. I would see Trino around sometimes during the next few years. According to Ruby and Alma, he was the hottest thing on the block. He would always make an effort to talk to me and get my attention. Once, he told me that every time he h
eard “Así te quiero yo . . . inocente y sencilla” by Los Yonics, he’d remember me. “I love your innocence,” he’d say. “You’re such a simple girl. One day you will be my wife.” He said that at thirteen I was still a little too young for him. “When you’re a bit older, we’ll talk about it again.”

  When I was thirteen and fourteen, I had my puppy loves with Sergio and Alfredo while Trino became Gus’s friend and would come over to our house sometimes. My dad warned Gus and my other brothers about bringing guys over to the house: “You open the doors of your house to your friends and they take your sister or your wife.” He still believes that to this day. Because of this, Trino stopped coming over, but one way or another, call it destiny, the devil, or God’s will, our paths crossed again one day on Parade Street. On that day in 1984, it wasn’t Pupi walking with me to my friend’s house, but a beautiful, blond living doll—my little sister, Rosie, who was almost three years old. I remember how cool and charming he was and how I was so infatuated with him. Now my stomach turns at the thought of finding Trino so attractive. My story with this man is horrific, but of course it did not start out that way.

  By June of that year, Trino and I had started to see each other in secret. I thought he was incredibly attractive. He dressed like a rebel and listened to Spanish rock. He was very charismatic, funny, a good storyteller. Most people who met Trino liked him instantly. I know I did.