Unbreakable: My Story, My Way (24 page)

I cried throughout the whole ceremony and reception. Part of me was crying with happiness because I was finally getting the fairy-tale wedding I’d always wanted. And part of me was crying with sadness because I worried that I was making a mistake.

That’s not to say our marriage wasn’t beautiful. It was, for some time. He traveled with me everywhere, he took care of me and my kids. He calmly entered into my world of craziness, which had grown
a bit more crazy that year, since I had just agreed to do my reality show,
I Love Jenni
, with the mun2 network.

When I got into watching a lot of the reality shows around 2007, I said to myself, “Well, fuck, my life is better than a
novela
. I should have one of those.” I wanted the world to see what really went on in my life. The media misconstrued things or flat-out made them up or exaggerated the facts. I wanted people to see that I was a girl from the hood who had made good. I knew it would be entertaining, but I also wanted it to inspire. I tried to sell it to a few of the big networks, but none of them wanted it.

“Fuck them,” I said, “we’ll do it on our own.” I made a pilot episode and mun2, Telemundo’s English-language sister network, wanted to take it. But by then I had become so busy with all my other projects that I didn’t think I even had the time for it. I suggested that they do a show based on Chiquis, and I would be the executive producer and appear on it when I could.

I knew Chiquis had the personality for it. She is funny, smart, sassy, and she is surrounded by a bunch of crazy-ass characters (one of them being her mama). We came up with the idea for a show called
Jenni Rivera Presents: Chiquis & Rac-Q
. Rac-Q was one of her friends, but she quit in the middle of it and then Chiquis carried the show.

After that first season I realized that it would be a great opportunity for all of the kids if I also did a show focused on me, so I decided I would make the time for it. That’s when I came up with
I Love Jenni
. After the success of Chiquis’s show, every single network that had rejected my pitch now wanted to do a show with me. But I wouldn’t consider leaving mun2. I have always said that I will stick with the people who believed in me first.

I saw
I Love Jenni
as a way to make money for my kids and show them how to work. And make no mistake, filming a reality show is hard work. A lot of days it’s a huge pain in the ass. At times I wanted
to hide from the cameras, but it was not an option. The production team shows up on your front step that morning ready to work, and we all have to show up too, no matter how shitty the day was going.

In December of 2010, we went through one of those shitty days, when my son Michael was accused of rape. He was nineteen and he had slept with a minor. When they broke up, the girl told her mother that she had had sex with Mikey.

I sat down with Mikey and asked him what had happened. I couldn’t believe that he would mistreat a female. He had grown up surrounded by women, and I never once saw him be anything but kind and tender. Mikey told me he had slept with this girl, but it had been consensual. It was decided to defend the allegations in court.

Before the case began, Rosie presented me the Victory Ring that I had given her during the trial with Trino. “This is for you,” she said. “Justice will be done again.” The case came to a close in March of 2011 when Mikey was given three years’ probation and a $600 fine.

Just when the saga with Mikey ended, a new one began with my longtime manager Gabo. I had a concert in Mexico where we were paid in cash. One of Gabo’s assistants borrowed a leather bag from the head security guard so he wouldn’t be carrying around the funds in his hands. When the assistant returned the bag to the security guard at the end of the night, the original contract was in the bag.

I looked at the contract and didn’t recognize any of the numbers. The tickets sold were more than I had been told; the amount I was paid was double what Gabo told me I was getting paid. For years, family and friends had been telling me that Gabo was not trustworthy, and now here it was in black and white on a legal document. It appeared as if he was taking half of my proceeds from the concert in addition to his management fee. We looked into the contracts, and it seemed that at every appearance where I was making $200,000,
I would receive only $100,000. We estimated that the total amount owed to me was between $1 million and $2.5 million.

Gabo knew more than anyone else how hard I worked. He knew how tiring and demanding it was to constantly be on the go, yet I always showed up and gave 100 percent. He knew how painful it was for me to be away from my kids. He also knew that everything I did, I did for them. I worked so hard to provide them with everything I never had. In my mind, Gabo did not hurt me. He did something for worse. The son of a bitch hurt my children.

The following week Gabo and I were in Acapulco chilling by the pool and eating lunch. At a quiet, calm moment I presented the issue.

“I know what you did,” I told Gabo. “There have been discrepancies in the payments and you owe me money.”

He denied it, and that made me even angrier. Here’s the thing: If I catch people doing something and they admit to it, I can forgive them right away. If they deny it, game on. Gabo and I had been together for over ten years. After all that time, you’d think he’d know who he was fucking with.

I left him in Acapulco and did not care how he made his way home.

I cried for Gabo as if it were a breakup. It wasn’t about the money. People had lied to me before, but they were never people I considered family. And that’s how I felt about Gabo. He was a brother who had betrayed me for so long when I was so loyal to him in return.

On May 20, 2011, I performed at La Feria de Guanajuato, in Guanajuato, Mexico. During the show a fan threw a full beer can onstage that skimmed my head and landed in the center of the
palenque
. My brother Juan was standing on the sidelines and went nuts. When it comes to his family, Juan loses all sense of control. He went after the guy and beat him up pretty bad. Two weeks later a video surfaced,
and the media frenzy began. Juan received a thousand death threats. Two weeks before this incident a female fan threw a beer can at me and I brought her onstage and poured a beer over her head. I got crucified for that as well. I am not saying that I was right, but when you have a full beer can flying at you onstage, you kind of lose your head.

People said the Riveras were killers and that we would go to Mexico to fill our pockets with money and humiliate the fans. I was scared. I thought I was going to lose my fan base. We held a press conference on June 7 and I apologized to my fans and reassured them about how important they were to me. I admitted my mistakes and took all the heat. I knew Juan had made a mistake, but he was my baby brother, my Angel Face, and I was going to stand by him.

The following week, on June 16 and 17, I had two back-to-back concerts at the prestigious Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City. I was afraid that nobody would show up. Once again, despite all of my imperfections, all of my flaws, the fans were there for me. Both nights were sold out. My fans held me up when I was so down on myself. They supported me when I was judging myself so harshly. They gave me love that I did not deserve.

On July 29, 2011, I had a concert date in Reynosa, Mexico, a town notorious for its drug cartels. A few days before I was set to perform, I got a phone call from the FBI telling me not to go sing.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because we got an informant inside a cartel, and they are planning to kidnap you.”

I thought it was bullshit. Anybody could call me from the FBI and tell me that. The FBI agent gave me a number and I called it. An FBI agent in San Diego answered. Oh, shit, I thought. This is real. I called my brother Juan to see if he could get some of his buddies in Mexico to protect me.

He called me back a half hour later: “I spoke to the main guy there. Nothing is going to happen.”

We were all still nervous. My band was already in Mexico waiting for me to arrive. The band told the promoters that they weren’t going to do the concert, so in retaliation the promoters held two of my employees hostage, demanding that I perform.

That night a hurricane came through Texas and hit the town in Mexico where I was going to land. It was the perfect excuse to bail out, but then at 7:00 p.m. the airport reopened. Juan drove to my house and begged me not to go.

“I have to,” I said. “If I don’t go, they will come after me or you or Lupe in the future. We can’t show fear.”

Months earlier, when there had been another scare during one of my concerts in Mexico, the fans had started to leave. So I said to them, “I get paid to sing, not run. Stay here with me.” I felt the same way now. I was not going to run. I was not going to be intimidated.

“If you go, then I’m going with you,” Juan said.

“No. You stay here.”

“No, Chay, I’m going.”

“I’m not asking you, Juan. I’m telling you. If something happens to me, you’re the only one who can take care of things. I’m going to take Esteban. You know where the money is. And, Brother, if anything happens to me, I want a red casket with butterflies.”

I flew from Van Nuys to McAllen with my team, among them my assistant Julie, my makeup artist Jacob, and my second assistant Vaquero. We played music the entire flight, specific songs that I had chosen. We were pressed for time, so I had to get ready on the plane. Jacob got to work on my makeup and Julie started on my hair. We listened to “Cuando Muere Una Dama” over and over again. As we walked off the plane Jacob, Julie, and I cried. Vaquero just stared in
shock. I told Jacob and Vaquero they could stay at hotel and wait until we got back. I didn’t even give Julie that option. I knew she wouldn’t leave me.

We got in a car that was surrounded by the fourteen Hummers and they drove us from the border to the venue. I had never felt such heat or tension. When we arrived, the building was surrounded by even more Hummers, but there were also military tanks and soldiers at every door and undercover among the crowd. We had the protection of the government, the military, and the cops, both good and bad.

I put it out of my mind as I sang for hours and drank the tequila shots my fans offered me, just as I did at every one of my performances. That day I may have had even more tequila than usual. After I stepped offstage, I was escorted right back to the Hummers, where the marines were waiting. We headed back to the border the same way we had come, surrounded by a caravan of marines and nervous as fuck. Once we crossed back over into Texas, we all could finally breath normally again. But I felt as if I had to get out of this life. I couldn’t live this way any longer. Of course I didn’t know how to pull myself out of it.

On July 26, 2011, I was presented with a star at the Poly Walk of Fame Ceremony at Long Beach Poly. Since I started recording music in 1993 I have been given many awards. I have appreciated every one, but to receive this recognition from the place where it all began was incredibly special. I have always been so proud to be from Long Beach and that I attended “the home of scholars and champions,” even though I attended for only a few months because I got pregnant. When I left Poly at fifteen years old I was so upset. To be asked back twenty-seven
years later and recognized for my achievements was the ultimate honor.

On September 3, 2011, I made it to the Staples Center, the end goal in the LA music scene. The place where I said that once I got there, I would retire. I was the first female regional Mexican artist to ever perform there. The funny thing was, I had worked so hard to get to that stage and dreamed of how great it would be, and then it really wasn’t. It was too big. It didn’t have the intimacy of the Gibson or the Kodak. I felt the same when I played at the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City. Though I could make a lot more money playing at venues such as the Staples Center or the Auditorio Nacional, I preferred to play at smaller theaters and
palenques
. The following year I did two back-to-back gigs at the Gibson instead of the large concert at the Staples.