by Jenni Rivera
I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t know what was right or what was wrong. I was going crazy.
That night my insanity became even more intense. The kids and Juan were all asleep, but I was wide awake at 3:00 a.m., sitting on the couch in front of the TV, holding a butcher knife in my hand. I wanted to kill him or myself that night. I didn’t want to live anymore. What was the use? The domestic violence. The difficulties of living on welfare and the constant struggles. The rape. Now this. How could all of this happen in one lifetime? How could this be happening to me and my family? This was the kind of stuff I had watched on The Cristina Show or Oprah, but I had never expected to live it myself. I didn’t know how to overcome this. I didn’t know if I could.
I cried like a baby that night and many nights to come. Where was God? Why did He allow this to happen? I thought He never gave us more than we could handle? How did He expect me to handle this? What could I possibly learn from such a horrifying experience? What was the lesson behind it?
I didn’t even want to know the answers to my questions. I just wanted the pain to go away. I wanted to take my life. But God had other plans for me. He did not let me go that night. He gave me the strength to move forward, slowly, with a heavy heart and heavy soul.
Every time Trino was supposed to take the kids, I would make up some excuse so I could have the time to press formal charges. After a few weeks Trino caught on, disappeared, and became a fugitive from the law.
I wouldn’t lay eyes on Trino again until nine years later, but my brothers never ceased to be on the lookout for him. My brothers know everyone underground. People would say to them, “Trino is going to be at this party on this day and at this place.” One night we all went to a house in Long Beach where Trino was supposed to be. My brothers were all outside waiting for him. I was nervous. Part of me didn’t want him to show up because I knew my brother Juan would kill him. Trino was always afraid of Juan. Though he was the youngest Rivera, he was also the biggest and the toughest. When it comes to protecting his family, he does not hold back. We waited for a while but Trino didn’t show up. That probably saved Trino’s life and saved Juan from being put behind bars.
Another time I was having a barbecue and Lupe was late. We were calling him, but there was no answer. Finally Lupe got to my house, flustered and out of breath. He had seen Trino on the freeway. Lupe started chasing after Trino in his car. For a good thirty minutes they were on a high-speed chase on the freeway before Lupe lost Trino. We knew Trino was in the area, but he had once again escaped.
I can say that when I found out what Trino had been doing to my babies, everything changed for me. My joy, my motherly dignity, my will to live, were ripped away from me. Though I had experienced difficulties in my life previously, I found out then what true suffering meant. Every day, every minute, every second hurt. The pain and trauma of that time is indescribable.
As a result of my stress and mental exhaustion, our baby girl, Jenicka Priscilla López, was born a few weeks early, on October 3, 1997. I had once prayed for a child who looked like me, and my prayer was answered with Jenicka. The second people saw her they said, “She’s your twin!” (And they still do.) She was so perfect, so sweet, and so easygoing. From the time she was an infant I called her Shaniqua. Don’t ask me why. I gave all of my kids (and anyone else close to me) crazy nicknames that make sense only to me. Jenicka got the most: Shaniqua, Shanisse, Chantilly Lace, and Ebatanisha Washington.
I tried my best to be a happy mother to my newborn girl and my older children. I pushed myself to continue being a devoted wife to my new husband. I still sold real estate and worked part-time at my father’s record label just as I did when I was pregnant. I cleaned the house and woke up at 4:00 a.m. to cook my husband’s breakfast and lunch for the day before he left for work at 5:00 a.m. I tended to my husband’s needs as best I could. I wanted him to be proud of me. I needed his love and support more than ever before, and I didn’t want to fail as a wife once again.
Unfortunately, by the time November came around, only a month after Jenicka was born, something did not feel right. Juan wasn’t as attentive or caring toward me. He seemed distant and began acting weird. He wasn’t as happy to spend time with me as he was before. Making our relationship work was no longer his priority and focus. At first, I wanted to shrug it off and act as if I hadn’t noticed the changes. I continued to be affectionate toward him although he wasn’t affectionate in return. I feared that he would stop loving me. I cried on my knees in desperation as I prayed to God every night: “Please, God, not that. I can’t go through this right now. Please make him love me like he did before.”
We began fighting about everything. Everything I did bothered him. From the words I said, to going to church, to the music I listened to. He didn’t like me playing Tupac or Biggie when he was around. I would change it to something more romantic, such as Sade or Kenny G, but that would only make things worse. We had to listen to the shit he wanted to play. The cooking wasn’t good enough anymore. The sink wasn’t clean enough. The kids weren’t quiet enough. I wasn’t good enough either.
One night the kids and I were sitting in the living room of our Compton home watching the Grammys. Juan wasn’t there. He had been spending a lot of time out of the house, and I had started to wonder whether he was cheating on me. He’d go to work early, nicely dressed and smelling good. But Juan has always taken care of himself, I told myself. And he loved me. And he knew how much I was going through. He wouldn’t dare put me through more. I was dealing with Trino and the girls. We had just had a baby, and we had gotten married to save him from deportation. All of these thoughts were going through my head as I was watching the winners walk to the podium to give their thank-you speeches.
“Mommy,” my eight-year-old, Jacqie, shouted. “You’re not listening, are you?”
“What? I am.”
“I just asked you why you don’t sing anymore. You can win a Gammy one day,” she said in her innocent little voice.
“Yeah, Mommy,” Chiquis seconded her. “Why don’t you sing again? You can win a Grammy, or at least be nominated for one.”
My poor babies, I thought. If they only knew how difficult and ugly the music industry was. How hard it was to be a female artist in my genre. More than that, if only they knew the real reason I had stopped singing was because my spirit had been so crushed the night I had been raped. I would never tell them the truth. They had more vision and belief in me than anyone else I had met during the time I was singing and recording. They had more vision than their own mother. My kids were dreamers. And that night their dreams lit a spark, a fire in my soul. A few days later, when my dad asked me to record another CD for him, I decided to give it another try. At the very least, as my father always said, I could just record the corrido album he so badly yearned for.
In June of 1998 my father called me into his office at La Musica del Pueblo, one of our family record stores on Pacific Avenue in Huntington Park. But he didn’t want to talk music this time. He told me he had heard from someone that Juan was messing around with quite a few people at work. Gus knew, but he did not have the guts to tell me. But my father couldn’t bear his daughter being made a fool of and couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“I’m not telling you what to do, mija,” he said. “That’s totally up to you. You know I’ve never butted into your relationships, but I don’t think it’s right. Especially considering everything you’ve been through, especially in this past year, and everything you did for him when he was locked up. Everyone is talking about it where he works. You need to make a decision and fix this shit.”
I could feel my heart breaking, but I didn’t want to show that to my father. I told him, “I will handle it, Daddy. Don’t worry. I will take care of this motherfucker.” As soon as I uttered those words, I felt myself turn from sad to furious. I stomped out the back door of the record store. How could Juan do this to me? I asked myself. I loved him! I was there for him when he was in jail. I had even
made his child-support payments during that time. I married him to save his ass from deportation. How could he do this to me after I had gone through so much pain?
As much as I wanted to, I decided not to kill him. It was what I always thought I would do if a man cheated on me. I knew that if I confronted him about it and screamed, fought, or cried, it wouldn’t do anything. I had to find a way to really get back at him. As I drove back to Compton, I thought and thought about what move I would make. Marisela’s CD was playing in the car stereo as I went over options in my head.
I decided not to say a word. Instead, I came up with a plan. First and foremost, I would make the fucker fall in love with me again. I just needed two months.
I hired a private investigator. He videotaped various days of Juan’s adventures with the putas at work. I found out which motels they would go to. I learned that he would throw away the lunches I’d prepared for him at 4:00 a.m. and go out to lunch with the hoes instead. “Qué pendeja soy,” I said to myself.
That summer was sad and emotionally draining for me. All the time my husband was cheating, Gus, my loving brother, the one who’d taught me to defend myself, the one who always called me beautiful, had been aware of what was going on and never told me. It had been going on for months and he said he couldn’t find a way to tell me. He too was from the hood and said that he had learned that a man should not rat on another man. He said he wasn’t and would never be a little ratting bitch. He loved and adored me and didn’t want to hurt me with the knowledge of Juan’s infidelity, so he opted to not mention it. I didn’t understand his point of view. I was hurt. Gus and I stopped speaking for eight months and ten days. It was painful and it killed me inside to be at family reunions, and we wouldn’t cross words with each other. We wouldn’t even look at each other. It was a horrible feeling. I was going through hell. In less than a year I had been raped, I had found out about the sexual abuse of my sister and daughters, my husband was cheating on me, and now I wasn’t speaking to my brother. My parents always taught us that family was first. With that in mind, and because I so terribly missed my brother’s hugs and kisses, I made the first move to mend our relationship. God works in mysterious ways. That experience taught us quite a bit. We haven’t fought, argued, or disagreed on anything since.
As much as I was hurting during that time, I enjoyed knowing that I was steps ahead of my husband and that soon he’d be in for a big surprise. For those two months I dressed in the skimpy outfits he liked, put on makeup, and did my hair every day. I gave him foot massages when he got home and sex every night. By September I had transferred the registrations of both vehicles to my name and paid off all of our credit-card debt. Then I was prepared to let him have it. It was going to go down my way. It was going to end the way I wanted it to end.
After we started being intimate again, I felt angry and sad when we were in bed. But this was the first sign that he was falling back in love with me. The changes I was making physically combined with the extra attention I was giving him were all working. We made a trip, just the two of us, to Laughlin, Nevada, and had a beautiful time. He had no clue that the shit was about to hit the fan and splatter all over his face.
At five thirty in the morning on August 1, 1998, I handed Juan his lunch just as on every other morning. “Baby, I love you,” he told me. “I’m sorry if I was mean and not affectionate toward you in the past. I don’t know what was wrong with me. I love you so much and I never want to lose you. When I come home from work today, I want you to be ready to go out. We’ll go to dinner and then dancing. We’ll have a good time, okay?”
That was exactly what I was waiting to hear. “That’s sounds great, baby. I love you with all my heart too. I’ll be ready.”
Tenderly, I kissed my husband good-bye, knowing it was the last time I would do so. As he jumped into my Lexus ES300 (oh, yes, he always got to drive the Lexus I had bought with my real estate earnings and left me with the Ford Explorer), I decided this would be the last time he showed off his car to his girlfriends at work. My heart was devastated, but my mind was strong and firm. I put on the Nike sport suit he liked to see me wear and headed out the door without my wedding band. The ring that supposedly symbolized our love, our unity, our faithfulness to each other. So much for that.
My friend Cynthia was waiting outside in her truck. Juan would be furious to know that she was one of my accomplices, since he hated her guts with a passion. She drove while I rode shotgun and our friend Nacho sat in the backseat. The drive to Torrance was horrible. I couldn’t wait to see the look on his face, but I was scared of how I was going to feel when he was no longer home with me. The fear didn’t stop me.
When we got to the parking-garage entrance, I told the security guards that I was there to see my brother and I would be out shortly. I had Cynthia park as close to the building door as possible. Since Fairchild Fasteners was technically on federal property and I would be trespassing, I needed to be able to enter and exit quickly.
I pushed the door open, making a loud noise, which got the attention I wanted from his fellow employees. As I stomped through the warehouse, I could feel everyone’s eyes on me. Some showed surprise, some showed confusion, some stared in disbelief, many seemed excited. Obviously, everyone knew what had been going on behind my back, and they knew exactly why I was there. I asked one of the employees where Juan was, and he pointed to an office door. Then I heard another coworker screaming at me, “You’re not supposed to be here!”
“No duh, menso! Tell me something I don’t know,” I said as I headed toward the door and pushed it open. Juan was sitting there with another employee. When he saw me, he looked as though he had been hit over the head with an iron pole.
“Where’s Maria’s husband?” I asked.
His face turned different colors—first pale, then red, then blue, then pale again. I thought he was going to faint. His eyes, wide open, began to water. I could see his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed hard. “What Maria?”
“The slut you’ve been fucking. The one with no ass. I noticed it in the video the private investigator took of you a few months ago.”
He remained silent.
“If not Maria, the other skank will do. You know, Lilly, the married one.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“The hell you don’t. You, this idiot sitting with you, and all the rest of the people in this joint know what’s been going on. You all just didn’t know that I knew. You all thought it was funny and cute, huh? Let me tell you what’s funny and cute. What’s cute is there is no reason for you to come home. What’s funny is that all your shit will be burning in the front yard. There will be nothing but ashes for you to pick up. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to need a ride after work.”
I turned around and headed back toward the doorway. Cynthia was waiting for me in the getaway car, while Nacho had already taken off in the Lexus. I had made an extra copy of the car key during the two-month “waiting period.” The drive back to Compton was quiet. I couldn’t believe I had gone through with it. I loved Juan so much, but I wasn’t about to let my guard down now. The pain of knowing that he had slept with someone else was too much for me to handle.
The job wasn’t finished yet. I had just seen Waiting to Exhale and I loved the scene where Angela Bassett lit all of her man’s clothes on fire and then smoked a cigarette as she watched them burn. You know what happened next.
I called my family and told them to come over and look through Juan’s closet and pick out anything that they wanted to take. Chiquis and I gathered the rest of his clothes and threw them in two trash cans. In went his underwear and T-shirts, his favorite Air Jordan sports outfits and shoes, his church dress suits. Juan knew how to dress, and he had a lot of nice, expensive clothes. I didn’t care. I went crazy showering his belongings with the lighter fluid. I enjoyed the feeling of vengeance and accomplishment when I threw a match in each garbage can. Then I lit a cigarette (though I didn’t smoke) and watch
ed the flames as I did my best Angela Bassett impression.
Juan, who got a ride from a coworker, arrived just in time to save a few hundred dollars from the pocket of one of the burning jackets in the melting plastic trash cans. I admit it was an evil thing to do, and I regret having done it while my children were watching. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like for them to see their mother hurting, but also to know that they would now be missing their stepfather in their lives, less than a year after their biological father had become a fugitive from the law.
The days after the separation were devastating. Juan moved back to his mother’s home in Huntington Park, and I stayed at the home in Compton before moving to my parents’ home in North Long Beach temporarily. I was not doing well financially, since I couldn’t bring myself to concentrate on work. All I could think about was my on-and-off feelings for Juan. It didn’t help that he would call me almost daily to try to convince me to give our relationship another try. Like all men caught red-handed, at first he was defensive. He told me I was evil and that he couldn’t believe I had gone so far as to hire a private investigator to follow him around. He also couldn’t believe that I had kept quiet for so many months, knowing he had cheated and focusing on making him fall in love with me again.
After I threw him out of the house and burned his clothing that August, I didn’t see him again until November. We barely even spoke. He would insist that he wanted me back and that I was the only person he wanted to be with. He was remorseful about what he had done, but I still didn’t want him back.
Soon after the incident Juan became depressed and kept on saying that he would do anything to show how sorry he was to have let our love down. Sometimes he would call or meet with me and demand to know when we would finally be able to put the whole dramatic nightmare behind us. He constantly begged me to forgive him and move forward with our relationship in the interest of our daughter and my three older kids. Although I sincerely wanted my children to experience stability at home and have a father figure, I didn’t know if I could handle living with him knowing that he had been unfaithful. It was extremely painful to think about, and I knew it would be difficult for me to trust him again.
