The Passing of Jenni Rivera

The announcement was greeted with disbelief and shock. It circulated quickly from person to person, spreading over the airwaves at the lightning speed of juicy gossip that was too terrible to ignore. Amidst the bustle of the holiday season, as people journeyed furiously along our ever-crowded southern California streets, the report was spread that Jenni Rivera’s plane had gone missing. It seemed as if tragedy had struck again.

For the past ten years we had witnessed the rise of this Mexican-American singer, scion of a famous family known collectively as the Rivera Dynasty. She and her brothers were part of a younger generation of Mexican-Americans who had achieved stardom as singers and entertainers. They were different, however, because they achieve a cross-over of a different sort. They hadn’t conquered the Anglo-American audience with pop or rock music infused with Latin flavors, the way Gloria Estefan and Cristina Aguilera and Richie Valens had done. Instead, they were exponents of different styles of music known as “banda” and “ranchera” (collectively grouped under Mexican “Regional” music), and what was noteworthy was that they had conquered Mexican audiences, those that had traditionally been very suspicious of their brethren north of the border.

It is a given that Mexican-Americans have forged a new identity, but this hasn’t always been seen in a positive light. They display a hybrid essence that combines elements and fuses different cultural perspectives and references.  Whether we call ourselves Latinos or Chicanos or Mexican-Americans or Pochos, we aren’t purists because we fully incorporate the symbolism of the frontier, what in other circumstances was termed “Nepantla” by the Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa. Even though not all Mexican-Americans (and I am using the most neutral term) live in barrios, many of them preserve a sense of group consciousness and the idea of communities as places of refuge in the face of a perpetual struggle for self-definition. I had once read that the critic Philip Ortego asserted that the key to Mexican-American identity involved precisely a dynamic of retreat and refuge, or to paraphrase it, a siege mentality. There was an element of truth to this.

But if Mexican-Americans experience alienation in the face of an outside culture that seems predatory and dismissive, it couldn’t help but be ironic that they found elements of this same posture on the part of Mexicans. After all, were not those sons and daughters of poor Mexican immigrants to the United States logically to be dismissed as second-hand ethnic brethren of questionable loyalty, those who, according to the prevailing ideological constructs of Mexican history, personify the figure of the “traitor”?

Yes, Mexicans despise the traitor as the vanguard of outside conquering forces. This seems ironic in light of the images that have circulated within the United States on the part of certain conservative sectors that consider Mexican immigrants themselves as part of a so-called “invading” force. In the discourse of right-wing ideologues, we are treated to the vision of a class of people who arrive en masse and wish to engage in “Reconquest”. This is the mirror image of the stereotype so prevalent in Mexico that views foreigners and Americans in particular as a conquering force, showing how much our respective countries have in common when it comes to demonizing the others in this mutual dynamic of exclusion and suppression.  It seems as if William Faulkner was right, and the “past” is never really “past”.

Mexican-Americans have traditionally been equated with the paradigmatic figure of La Malinche. She was the translator who accompanied Hernán Cortés and helped him to forge alliances with disaffected indigenous tribes, unifying and incorporating them into his army and using them to challenge and defeat the Aztecs. She learned the language of the Spaniard and helped him to overturn a whole civilization, ushering in a cycle of destruction and death in the view of patriotic Mexicans who choose at times to overlook how it ushering in a new mestizaje. In revolutionary discourse, the conquest ushered the cycle of dependence that led to a tragic history, one that in Eduardo Galeano’s view is tantamount to an “open vein” wherein the native American cultures were bled dry. This conception has left a deep psychological imprint on the Mexican (and Mexican-American) mind, and has led to an obsession with decolonization.

So Mexicans are similarly distrustful of the Mexican-American, the one who speaks the language of the potential conquerer because he or she serves as the go-between. To whom do they owe their loyalty, after all, and why is it that they seem to forget the formulas and rituals that bind them to their mother country? Weren’t their immigrant mothers and fathers guilty of abandonment of Mother Mexico, and of having weakened family ties? And how to accommodate the bewildering figure of the pocho, the Mexican-American who no longer spoke Spanish and who was grounded in no stable tradition?

Jenni Rivera and her brother Lupillo are part of a family that was raised in the Long Beach area. They are Mexican-Americans, raised in this country and thus raising suspicion among Mexicans. They also demonstrated astonishing talent as singers and performers in genres that were cultivated by Mexican artists. Their Spanish was more than fluent, and they seemed to have crafted personas that appealed widely to their audience, singing in traditional styles. It was as if they were affirming their roots, thus helping them to gain acceptance.

Their story was not really chronicled in the mainstream press, as noted by journalist Gustavo Arellano of the alternative Orange County Weekly. Indeed, this mainstream press seems to perpetually miss stories that are important to ethnic communities in general, and to Mexican-American in particular.  It seems to adopt instead a retroactive approach that gives halting and superficial coverage after the fact. The cry was echoed over and over in this press, “Jenni who? Why hadn’t I heard of this figure?”, even among those journalists who otherwise pride themselves for their cosmopolitan bent, as seen in the confession of Marco Wurman of the NPR program “The World”. In whose world do they live?, Arellano seems to ask. He seems to suggest that this lack is a product not so much of a policy of involuntary oversight as of an unwillingness to dedicate resources to these stories, as if it were a matter of allocation and not of training.

As my prior comment suggests, I’m not sure that this criticism holds up entirely, especially as it pertains to the figure of Jenni Rivera. It certainly seems as if coverage of her career had been scant, and the reaction to her death evoked surprise and belated stories about not so much about her but seemingly about the grief it evoked within the Mexican-American community. When it comes to the Latino community (a more general label), the news media seems to focus on immigration issues, demographic trends, and the impact of the growing Latino vote on politics, which is a traditional tandem of concerns.

This coverage seems to convey a sense of monolithic community that is far from the case. There are many second, third, fourth and even older generations of Latinos for whom immigration no longer represents an abiding concern. These populations have long been settled in this country, and have frequently intermarried with members of other ethnic groups, while continuing to preserve a connection with their Latino ancestry. Also, the obsession with the political impact of this community ties into the concern about the increasing political divisiveness in this country, where divisions seem magnified and where comparison is elicited over and over to a prior moment of history, the epoch of the Civil War. (Witness the abiding fascination expressed for Lincoln and his presidency.) Were it not for the Latino vote, and specifically the strong support lent to Democratic candidates, Barack Obama may possibly have lost this last election.

But these prisms fail to take into account the everyday life of Mexican-Americans. It is perhaps easier to continue to view these communities as ethnic blocks that live a separate reality, concentrated as they are in ethnic ghettos. There is certainly an abiding nativist narrative that views them as a group that harbors separatist sentiments, to refer to the idea of the minority community that fails to assimilate, according to writers such as Samuel Huntington. Crime and educational statistics are also part of an alarmist thread of coverage that reinforces once again a conception that pervades mainstream as well as partisan news outlets. It is either alarmist (think Lou Dobbs and his obsession with immigration and “anchor babies”) or, in a few instances, celebratory in a certain sanitizing impulse, as in the case of figures such as Edward James Olmos who graced the cover of Time magazine as part of a story that proclaimed the decade of the 80s as that of the Latino.

Jenni Rivera, however, rose to prominence for different reasons. As mentioned before, her crossover was not with the rest of the North American public, but instead with her ancestors in Mexico. She was a fiercely independent figure who was not perceived as threatening but instead affirming, singing as she did of her own personal travails with a bravado that was thrilling to many. She wasn’t a political figure, as is Los Angeles Supervisor Gloria Molina who was the first to join that governing body, nor was she a political activist who brought attention to immigration issues and to movements of social reform. She was an artist who sang of the personal and who was known for her honesty and ambition.

If she didn’t fit in the traditional prisms that dictate coverage of this community, then why was she deemed newsworthy after the fact? Was it because tragedy and the idea of unfulfilled promise tend to dominate coverage of Mexican-Americans, and because the pattern had been set from the very beginning on the part of a community that so frequently feels itself under siege? I am reminded of the messiah complex, and of how it helped to provide ideological coherence to a biblical narrative that reflected Jewish concerns with survival and identity. The messiah, after all, would help to redeem the suffering of the Jewish community, and would signal the achievement of a much-desired stability as well as giving meaning to a painful history. For a population that had been redeemed from slavery, it seemed as if Jews had exchanged one sort of bondage for another, and the prophets proclaimed a need to return not only to a purified form of Judaism, which can be viewed as a form of renewed and vigorous essentialism, but also for the hope of redemption that would validate this return to their roots. They were to earn their redemption.

For Mexican-Americans, we have also tended to look toward messiah figures. If Mexicans have a pantheon of patriotic and cultural figures who helped forge Mexican identity, and if many of them had tragic ends, this served the purpose of ratifying the need to remain true to their essential values.  We can start with figures such as Cuahtemoc (the last Aztec emperor who actually fought against the conquerors, as opposed to Moctezuma who is seen as having equivocated disastrously) and the “Niños Héroes”, the heroic youth cadets who hurled themselves to their deaths from the height of their academy as a gesture of resistance to invading American forces, or the figure of Emiliano Zapata, killed in an ambush after having provided the most lasting ideological contribution to the Mexican Revolution (the cry “Tierra y Libertad!”, Land and Liberty!), then Mexican-Americans have a similar pantheon.

We can signal people such as the tragic figure of Richie Valens, alluded to before and composer of astonishing hits that seemed to signaled a return to roots with the added energy of the youth culture (“La Bamba”), or the journalist Rubén Salazar, one of the very few chroniclers of the Mexican-American experience during the 1960s and who was killed by a projectile fired into the Silver Bullet bar where he had taken refuge after covering a political demonstration. And of course we have the figure of César Chávez, the labor leader who fasted in order to bring attention to the plight of agricultural workers and who died in relative obscurity in the 90s (I remember how much his public profile had slipped back then), only to be resurrected as a hallowed Chicano icon. 

It seems as if our community (I use “our” because I myself am Mexican-American) thrives on these tragic figures. We don’t have many narratives of heroes who die peacefully of old age surrounded by their families in dignified circumstances. What resonates with us is the story of youthful potential wasted, or in the case of César Chávez, of a Gandhi-like liberation figure who, by virtue of his having lapsed into obscurity, underwent a similar “death”. They are larger than life figures, and the hero is always painted in broad and hallowed brushstrokes.

But Jenni was different. She sang compulsively about her most intimate experiences with marital discord, about conflicts with envious figures, and about the struggles of living in a “macho” world that so often seemed to equate feminine independence with perversity. She was a “Chacalosa” or “Malandrina”, words that evoke perverse and maligned figures, and her songs were all the more thrilling because of this. They could also be viewed as vulgar and earthy and obscene, but that was part of the thrill of chronicling her experiences, capturing this other side.

She had also moved into reality television, a form of entertainment that is artfully staged to emphasize manufactured drama as well as cheap thrills. Her program, which detailed her family’s escapades, was indeed over-the-top, but it also revealed vital energy and the sense of an artistic trajectory that was accelerating, and this may have been part of the thrill of watching. It wasn’t enough that she shamelessly “shook her booty” in tandem with her teenage daughter, but that they seemed to demonstrate such glee as they did so, for a woman who struggled furthermore with weight and health issues. She was no manufactured pop star a la Paulina Rubio (no relation to the Cuban-American Senator Marco Rubio), she seemed authentic and, furthermore, her music was vital and assertive.

It is a shame that the mainstream press missed this story, but in order to appreciate it, they would have had to be aware of the cultural matrix from which it sprung. She was traditional by boldly returning to her roots and adopting traditional Mexican musical genres, but she was also transgressive in a way that seemed to break out of the paradigm that seemed to define Mexican-Americans. She was bold and brassy and sensuous and independent, but she was also proud about representing her community, and about projecting a different image. Mexican-Americans, after all, are not to be encapsulated by the label of “pocho” (that derisive term of abuse hurled at those who supposedly reject their cultural heritage), but she represented instead a form of dynamism that evoked a thrilling new combination.

With no appreciation of this cultural matrix, it is understandable that mainstream media would have missed this story. It isn’t only a matter of allocating journalist to cover these stories that emerge out of ethnic communities such as the Mexican-American community, it is about finding journalist who have the necessary training and background in the issues that characterize them. Journalists are also bound by prevailing ideological constructs, and because we don’t have sustained coverage of these communities, it is no surprise that the trajectory that had been so amply chronicled in ethic media was not covered by the mainstream.

To excoriate this press, as Gustavo Arellano, is to fault the media for what is a universal failing. It isn’t that they are classist, or that continue to fall into the trap of lumping Mexican-Americans with Mexicans, and thus, relegating them to the status of a “foreign” group. It is that they seem to be too one-dimensional  in their coverage, failing to appreciate the nuances which would provide a clue as to the significance of Jenni Rivera’s career.

One suspects that this may be the reason why they are missing the story of hybrid essence and the abiding eternal struggle for transformation and vindication that is also taking place in the Middle East under the aegis of the “Arab Spring”. Change need not be threatening, nor a return to one’s cultural roots. We can find parallels for the Mexican-American experience in that of other communities.

Perhaps lasting change and transformation is always grounded in the everyday, not in grand ideological constructs. Rivera was sensitive to political issues, and was an advocate for immigrants as well as Mexican-Americans without being an ideologue.

Here is to the memory of Jenni Rivera: the future is here, and it is the province of those who are able and willing to combine the old and the new, the public and the private, and the past and the future. To Jenni, our brassy and perverse pocha revolutionary.




Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013