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Flowers, candles and messages pay tribute to the singer outside the Basilica de Guadalupe in Monterrey, Mexico. More Photos »
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: December 10, 2012 18 Comments
Jenni Rivera, the Mexican-American singer and reality television star known as “the Diva of Banda,” died early Sunday when the plane in which she was traveling crashed outside Monterrey, Mexico, after a performance there. She was 43.
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Her death was confirmed by the National Transportation Safety Board. Ms. Rivera was on her way to the Mexico City area, where she was scheduled to tape an episode of the Mexican version of the singing competition show “The Voice,” for which she was a coach.
Fully bilingual, Ms. Rivera, who lived in the Encino section of Los Angeles, was one of the biggest stars of the banda genre, a brassy, percussive style of pop music invented in northern Mexico and enriched in the American Southwest. She sold more than 15 million records, was nominated three times for the Latin Grammy Award, and developed a reputation for hard-hitting lyrics that addressed relationships between the sexes with a frankness reminiscent of American country music; one of her albums, released in 2007, was titled “My Crazy Life.”
When Ms. Rivera, as a divorced mother of three, began her professional career in the 1990s, she fought against being consigned to areas traditionally reserved for female singers: those of the romantic balladeer or poppy chanteuse. Radio stations resisted her music at first, in part because banda was dominated by all-male ensembles, but she persevered and broke through with a song called “Las Malandrinas,”about women who like to party and drink and won’t allow men to exploit them.
In recent years, though, Ms. Rivera showed signs of wanting to move beyond the banda category. In 2009 she had a hit with a ranchera CD called “La Gran Señora,”(“The Great Lady”), and her most recent CD, “Joyas Prestadas” (“Borrowed Jewels”), was issued in both banda and pop versions and has been a hit in both formats.
Like her Mexican-immigrant parents, Ms. Rivera showed a strong entrepreneurial streak; her father, Pedro, ran a music store and later a small independent record label. In addition to her music, she founded and ran television production companies, a cosmetics company (which markets a perfume bearing her name), a real estate firm and a clothing company, which sells a line of jeans.
Jenny Dolores Rivera Saavedra (she later changed the spelling of her first name) was born in Long Beach, Calif., one of six children. Growing up in a musical environment, Ms. Rivera was exposed from an early age to traditional Mexican styles like corrido, ranchera and mariachi.
Listening to English-language pop music was not encouraged at home, she said in interviews, so her initial exposure to rock and soul came at school and from the radio. Two brothers, Guadalupe, known professionally as Lupillo Rivera, and Juan, are also performers of Mexican regional music, as is her father.
“Mexican music runs through my veins,” Ms. Rivera told the trade magazine Billboard earlier this year. “That’s all I heard. I had no choice. We had our own music stands in the local swap meets. We sold cassette tapes at the time, and that’s how we made a living. We stepped it up a bit when my father opened his own record store and eventually started his own record label.”
Banda is primarily popular among Mexican-Americans, Mexicans and Central Americans. But in recent years Ms. Rivera’s popularity expanded to other Hispanic groups in the United States thanks to three reality shows on which she and her children, by now five, starred, broadcast on Mun2, a cable channel owned by NBC Universal.
In the best known of the shows, “I Love Jenni,” Ms. Rivera cultivated a tough-talking persona, prone to making hilarious, outrageous statements and unafraid of offending family or friends. “Have a great day, don’t get pregnant,” she would warn a daughter. Promotional material for the show, which went on the air in 2011 and began production of its third season last month, described her as “the mama with lots of drama.”
“It doesn’t bother me at all that some people think I am too outspoken,” Ms. Rivera said in 2011. “Actually, if they are thinking about me, it bothers them. But oh, well, they’ll get over it.”
Ms. Rivera’s tough-mother approach stemmed from her own experience. By the time she was 16, she was already married and had given birth to her first daughter, Janney, known as Chiquis and featured on two Mun2 reality shows. Ms. Rivera was married three times, most recently to the former major league pitcher Esteban Loaiza, who played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Yankees, among other teams. That marriage ended when she filed for divorce this fall.
At her death Ms. Rivera was developing an English-language family comedy for ABC with the producers of the hit show “Designing Women,” in which she was to star. The series was part of a broader effort to duplicate her success in the non-Latino English-language market. She had recently signed on with the Hollywood talent agency CAA, had a role in the gritty independent film “Filly Brown” and was writing and recording songs in English in preparation for a possible CD aimed at the English-language pop market.
Besides her brothers Guadalupe and Juan and her father, Ms. Rivera is survived by her mother, Rosa; three other siblings, Pedro Jr., Gustavo and Rosie; and her five children: Janney, Jacqueline and Michael, from her first marriage, to José Trinidad Marín, and Jenicka and Johnny, from her second marriage, to Juan López.
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