Received: 30 September 2015 Revised: 17 May 2016 Accepted: 30 May 2016

DOI: 10.1111/jpms.12192

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Sonic Pedagogies: Latina girls, mother-daughter

relationships, and learning feminisms through the
consumption of Jenni Rivera
Yessica Garcia-Hernandez

University of California, San Diego

On the morning of December 9, 2012, Univision, the largest Spanish-language television station in the United States,
interrupted its regular programming with a terse announcement: “The plane that singer Jenni Rivera boarded after
her concert in Monterrey, Mexico is missing.” After hours of searching for the plane, Mexican officials confirmed that
Jenni Rivera had tragically passed in a plane explosion. I still remember the day I heard the announcement of her death
as if it were yesterday. I cried for hours while listening to her music on the radio station La Que Buena (105.5 FM) in
her hometown—and my own—of Long Beach, California, and reminiscing about the role her music played in my life.
Indeed, I trace the roots of my feminist girlhood to my own mother(s), and then to Jenni Rivera. As the daughter of
immigrant parents and a resident of Long Beach, I continue to strongly identify with many of the lyrics in Jenni Rivera’s
songs, which have taught me to recognize and refuse oppressive gender relationships in traditional Mexicano machista
households.
Chicana singer Jenni Rivera was the first woman to raise the popularity of banda sinaloense and corrido genres of
Mexican regional music internationally.1 Jenni, as she was affectionately referred to by her fans, sold more than 15 mil-
lion records worldwide and had a transnational, multigenerational fan base.2 National Public Radio’s arts correspon-
dent, Mandalit del Barco, said that Jenni “became popular for singing about her own troubles, the domestic violence
she suffered as a young woman, her struggles with weight, being a single mother and her three failed marriages.” With
her songs constantly topping the Latin Billboard charts in the United States, Jenni became the most popular female
singer of regional Mexican music by appealing to a predominantly female audience. Billboard’s music critic Leila Cobo
reported that Jenni was “a woman of many firsts: the first female banda artist to sell out the Gibson Amphitheater
(2006), the first Latin artist to sell out the Nokia Theatre (2009) and the first female regional Mexican artist to head-
line the Staples Center (2011)” (Cobo). According to a fan named Vernice Cornejo who was interviewed by Mandalit
del Barco, Jenni’s cultural importance was due to the pedagogies about survival she transmitted to her fans. Cornejo
stated, “Hispanic women, we go through a lot of physical abuse, mental abuse. And she actually said it herself as she
went through it, and she wanted us to see in her that she made it so we could’ve made it just the way she made it”
(Del Barco).
Although there were several memorial events taking place in Long Beach on the Monday after Jenni’s death I went to
Plaza Mexico, a predominantly Chicanx shopping center a few miles away in Lynwood, to leave a candle for her. I went to
Plaza Mexico because I heard from Despierta America, a morning news show on Univision, that they would have a tribute
for Jenni there. The timing of her unexpected death coincided with the yearly Plaza Mexico celebration for La Virgen
de Guadalupe and together the festival and Jenni’s memorial became a sign of love and celebration for both women.
When I arrived, I saw many girls with their mothers wearing Jenni Rivera t-shirts and singing her songs together. If a
girl did not arrive with a Jenni shirt, she would walk with her mother to the silk-screening shops inside the plaza’s swap

Journal of Popular Music Studies 2016; 28: 427–442 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jpms 

c 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 427
428 HERNANDEZ

meet to get a shirt with Jenni’s photo and a dedicated message on it. After the girls received their wearable mementos,
they would walk back to the tribute and participate by screaming her name “Jenni, Jenni, Jenni” and applauding the
women and girls who were performing Jenni’s music. The performances took place next to the kiosko (kiosk), outside
of the shopping center, adjacent to the candles set up to celebrate La Virgen de Guadalupe and now Jenni.3 “Que viva
Jenni Rivera,” said a 9-year-old girl at Plaza Mexico after singing Jenni’s song “Basta Ya.” I was particularly impressed
by her because she was so young and yet transmitted the intense sentimiento Jenni performed on stage.
The day after the tribute in Lynwood, Univision Noticias uploaded to YouTube a video filmed at Plaza Mexico titled
“Jenni Rivera Fans Pay Tribute, ‘She’s my Idol, She’s My Everything.’” The video highlighted two main stories, along
with other Latina voices: the story of mother Hilda Medina, her daughter Breanna Gomez, and Hilda’s granddaughter
(Breanna’s daughter who is unnamed in the video); and that of Elizabeth Mendoza (another Jenni fan). The video fol-
lows Hilda and Breanna as they enter the shopping center to order three personalized Jenni t-shirts. There they meet
Elizabeth, who also shares her “I love Jenni” story. Elizabeth tells the camera that Jenni “is my idol, she is my every-
thing!” Elizabeth explains that she identified with Jenni because, like the artist, she also worked at the swapmeet with
her family. Hilda, Breanna, and Elizabeth’s stories stood out to me because they reflected the intergenerational narra-
tives of fandom as identification/testimonio with Jenni that I had become accustomed to when listening to her music or
watching her reality show I Love Jenni. The often intergenerational dynamic of Jenni fandom is evident with Breanna’s
comment “My mom was the one who got me into listening to her.” Toward the end of the segment, all three of them are
captured putting on their Jenni shirts.
Univision’s fan-based tribute video to Jenni prompted me to ask the following questions: How did working-class
Latina/Chicana girls make sense of Jenni’s music? What role did her music play in their lives? What is the social
significance of the intergenerational mother–daughter fan culture that is cultivated through Rivera’s following? I
have pondered these questions since Jenni’s death, and in this article I share the findings of the questionnaires and
charlas I conducted several weeks after Jenni’s death with working-class teenage Latina/Chicana girls while I was work-
ing at a high school in Long Beach. Inspired by the girls’ responses, I argue that listening, watching, and performing Jenni
helps girls negotiate informal teachings that I call Jenni’s sonic pedagogies. Through these sonic pedagogies the girls
have negotiated surviving “real problems,” which they identified as dealing with working-class struggles, relationship
problems, and sexuality. Moreover, instead of shutting down connections between daughter and mother, a common
trope of mother–daughter relationships in adolescence, for most of the fans I talked to, consumption of Jenni nurtured
connections between them.
My analysis draws from Jillian Hernandez and Anya Wallace’s call for girls’ studies scholars to be attentive to the
creation of an “erotics of feminist solidarity,” which they define as a “forging of alliance grounded in radical sexual
politics and attentiveness to the affective and corporeal dimensions of conducting feminist work, even when it is not
defined as such” (Feminist Wire, emphasis added). Although the radicalism of sexual politics is not explicit in the song
lyrics the girls choose (as it is with “Boss Ass Bitch”), I draw on the erotics of feminist solidarity because it “recognizes
the conditions under which women and girls of color craft their identities and sexualities” and because Hernandez
and Wallace’s description of how music sustains girls and activates a creative space where they can express themselves
reflects for me the affective and corporeal, women- and girl-centered dimension of how Jenni’s sonic pedagogies are
crafted, sustained, and embodied particularly among mothers, aunts, cousins, and friends. Moreover, ethnic studies
scholar Deborah Vargas has noted that Jenni’s “public testimony of personal life dramas enabled social network spaces
of conversations, imitation, and contestation among her fans” (291).
In this article I describe how the girls with whom I conducted research created “conversations, imitations, and con-
testations” of Latina working-class struggles. In conversation with Vargas’s argument that Jenni cultivated a technol-
ogy of testimonies through her music that allowed fans to foster alternative Mexicana subjectivities and communi-
ties (287), I focus on Jenni’s girl listeners and add that this technology of testimonies has cultivated various forms of
Latina empowerment and mother–daughter teachings, a gender-specific space of pleasure, understanding, and com-
passion for themselves and each other.4 The conceptual framework of Jenni’s sonic pedagogies enables me to consider
how Latina girls’ consumption of Jenni’s music through radio, performances, and reality shows foregrounds the trans-
mission of Latina empowerment which centers what Gloria Anzaldúa (2000) calls conocimientos—alternative ways of
HERNANDEZ 429

knowing that integrate reflections with action to create knowledge that challenges the status quo. I read Jenni and
her conocimientos as mediators who were able to translate “gut knowledges” of single motherhood, abuse, and self-
love/hate between mothers and girls. In describing conocimientos Anzaldúa states,

Conocimiento comes from opening all your senses, consciously inhabiting your body and decoding its
symptoms… . Attention is multileveled and includes your surroundings, bodily sensations and responses, intu-
itive takes, emotional reactions to other people and theirs to you, and, most important, the images your imagi-
nation creates—images connecting all tiers of information and their data. Breaking out of your mental and emo-
tional prison and deepening the range of perception enables you to link inner reflection and vision—the mental,
emotional, instinctive, imaginal, spiritual, and subtle bodily awareness—with social, political action and lived
experiences to generate subversive knowledges. These conocimientos challenge official and conventional ways
of looking at the world, ways set up by those who benefit from such constructions (120).

Framing sonic pedagogies with conocimientos is particularly important for this case study and my further work
with Latina girls because most public high school curriculums disregard their cultural corporeal knowledges; often-
times pedagogies based on cultural instinctual knowledges are not recognized because they do not occur in class-
room settings, do not have a lesson plan, nor are they based on a written tradition.5 However, as Anzaldúa points
out and Jenni affectively embodies in her music and performances, sonic pedagogies, and the pedagogies inspired in
fan-to-fan interactions insist that learning can happen anywhere music is felt, produced and performed, listened and
danced to.
The article is organized into several sections. The first explains the juxtapositional method I use to make sense of
the girls’ responses to a questionnaire I circulated to gather information on the consumption practices that guided
girls’ understandings of Jenni. The second explores the sociality of listening to Jenni’s music and how it allows for an
intergenerational witnessing of conocimientos that, when embodied, create sonic pedagogies of empathy, survival, and
resistance. The third explains how and why girls watched the reality shows Jenni produced. This section underscores
how the televisual component of Jenni’s singing career enhanced a multilayered fan culture between existing fans. I
conclude by analyzing a YouTube video of a preteen girl’s performance of Jenni and argue that she is undergoing a
feminist sonic boot camp.

1 METHOD/OLOGY: QUESTIONNAIRES, CHISME, AND REALITY SHOWS

To make sense of how some Latina girls construct sonic pedagogies and mother–daughter relationships through the
consumption of Jenni via mediated TV, radio, and music, I examine literary and cultural Jenni Rivera texts along with
ethnographic and personal narratives, both my own and those of the girls I worked with. The Jenni Rivera texts I analyze
consist of her published autobiography, her songs, and the reality shows she produced (Chiquis and Raqc and I Love
Jenni). Juxtaposing close readings of these texts against the ethnographic narratives is crucial because it allows us to
“listen in detail” and “listen behind the scenes of popular representations of Latina celebrity” (Paredez, 2009; Vasquez,
2013).
The ethnographic narratives come from girls who were recruited from the same high school in Long Beach from
which I graduated. I worked there as a college aide to English language learners (ELL) for 18 months in 2012 and 2013.
In fact, ELL was a placement to which I, too, was assigned when I attended school there. The person who hired me felt
that it would be powerful to place me at that site because students would be able to relate to me and see me as a positive
role model and mentor. The premise was that if a D-grade-point-average, almost-high-school-dropout, working-class
alumna was able to “make it” to college and continue into graduate school, they could too. I worked there four days a
week for three and a half hours every day. There was something powerful about rewalking those same hallways, remi-
niscing on my paisa girl days and watching other girls hang out in the same places I did, that inspired the questionnaire
and conversations about Jenni and Mexican regional music. Most of these girls were even going through situations
similar to ones I had gone through when I was there.
430 HERNANDEZ

When I conducted the study I was a graduate student in the department of Chicana/o Studies at Califor-
nia State University, Los Angeles. My research focus was the youth culture connected with Jenni Rivera, corri-
dos, and banda sinaloense; in other words paisa culture. Paisa is a vernacular expression used to describe some-
one who likes to listen and dance to banda, corridos, and norteño music.6 Therefore, a paisa girl is someone who
is proud of her Mexicanidad (particularly her roots in the rancho) and expresses it by her style in music, slang,
fashion, and culture. (This identity is particularly distinguishable in high school.) I constantly had nostalgic con-
versations with my supervisor, Ms. Guzman, about our paisa party days when I was a student at the high school.
Because Ms. Guzman knew about my research interests, she helped me recruit eight Mexicana/Latina girls from
the student club she advised. Ms. Guzman knew that the girls listened to Jenni and other Mexican regional music
artists and they trusted me because I was her college aide and an alumna.7 The girls often had lunch meetings
in Ms. Guzman’s classroom because she was their club advisor. During our lunch charlas (informal conversations),
we would talk about popular culture chisme (gossip) that included chats about Jenni, other Mexican regional music
artists, the Kardashians, Blac Chyna, and other artists.8 We definitely constituted the rasquache version of the
television show El Gordo y La Flaca.9 These lunch charlas about popular culture chisme shaped the questionnaire
I later used with the girls, as I understand chisme as a site of knowledge.10 This understanding draws from Var-
gas’s notion of archisme, which acknowledges hearsay, murmurs, and silences as gendered archives that histori-
cize “nonnormative Chicana/o genders and sexual desires” (77). The charlas I had with the girls inform my readings
of Jenni.11 Seven of the girls—Maria (age 17), Anastacia (age 16), Yanel (age 17), Monica (age 16), Estrella (age
16), Sofia (age 16), and Mia (age 16)—were daughters of Mexican immigrant parents. Mellissa (age 15) was the
daughter of Salvadoran immigrant parents.12 For purposes of confidentiality, the names used in this article are
pseudonyms.
The primary purpose of the questionnaire was to collect data on how Latina girls negotiate the music of Jenni.
It consisted of the following questions: Who is Jenni Rivera to you? Does anyone else in your family listen to Jenni
Rivera? How were you introduced to Jenni Rivera’s music? Do you identity with Jenni Rivera’s life, why? Do you
relate to Jenni Rivera’s music, why? When do you listen to Jenni Rivera’s music? Do you see Jenni Rivera as a role
model, why? What similarities and differences do you have with Jenni Rivera? What does Jenni Rivera’s music make
you feel? Did you watch Jenni Rivera’s reality show I Love Jenny, why? I used language like “identify with,” “relate
to,” and “role model” because I heard these girls use that language during our previous charlas. I also knew that they
felt personal pride about Jenni also being a native of Long Beach. Even after I stopped working at the high school,
I continued to keep in touch with some of the girls through Zumba classes, with others through the migrant edu-
cation summer camp, and to help them with college-related mentorship. Through these interactions, I have even
had the opportunity to meet some of the girls’ mothers.13 It has been during these interactions that I have con-
tinued to follow up with them about the questionnaires. Some of them even ask me “Ms., you are still working
on Jenni? That is a long time!” and I respond “Oh girl, this is going to take me many, many years” and we both
laugh.
In the first stages of this article, I was very hesitant about including my own paisa girl story.14 Part of my anxiety
in including my girl story was the fear that I would not be seen as a credible objective ethnographer because I was
too close to the music and culture. But the intimacy I have with the genre allowed me to organically connect with the
girls and the broader student population that I worked with at the high school. My self-identification with paisaness
allowed the students to talk to me honestly about Jenni’s music (and Mexican regional music more broadly too). For
that reason, I also use the method of autoethnography to accompany my fieldwork and the charlas/questionnaires I had
with the girls.15 Dawn-Elisa Fischer defines autoethnography as “part of a woman-centered and/or gender-sensitive
methodological repertoire” that allows for personal reflections along with multiple stories (88). Fischer clearly states
that “autoethnography practice is not solely about self; this method serves to clarify connections among collectives”
(ibid.). In writing about these girls and La Yaquesita (my paisa girl nickname), I am allowing myself to be what the anthro-
pologist Ruth Behar calls a “vulnerable observer” and scholar. My story is used to join the girls in paying a home trib-
ute to Jenni. In this article, we are celebrating our “creative geniuses,” singing with Jenni, and screaming Playa Larga,
baby!16
HERNANDEZ 431

2 JENNI TIME: LISTENING TO MUSIC AND LA DIVA OF BANDA

My first Jenni Rivera CD was Parrandera, Rebelde y Atrevida (2005) and it was pirata (a pirated version). My
friend Rosa and I bumped this album at full volume while cruising down the blocks of Long Beach.17 Rosa’s dad
had a gray Ford truck with a good sound system in it, so we felt chingonas listening to Jenni Rivera.18 The first
song, “Parrandera, Rebelde, y Atrevida,” was my anthem because it gave me an identity I could relate to. In those
days, I partied hard! I went to many different paisa nightclubs each week. I expressed my Mexicanidad through
this music scene. During these days my family was split in two because my mother had been deported to Mexico,
so in many ways Jenni Rivera served as a surrogate mother for me. During my girl days, Jenni Rivera transmitted
lessons I needed about sexuality, gender, race, and class. (La Yaquesita, memories from 2005)

In our charlas the girls shared that listening to music made them feel better about problems they were having at
home: “I listen to music and remind myself that I can overcome the problem,” “I just bust up the music and listen and
cry,” and “[W]hen I listen to music, it takes my problems away. It also makes me feel better.” Through their responses,
these girls demonstrate that their quotidian practice of music listening is an active process that makes them feel bet-
ter. As Latinx Studies scholar Frances Aparicio observes, “Listening, like consumption, is not merely a passive behav-
ior, an ideological consent, but rather constitutes a potential instance of rewriting [life and] culture” (123). These girls
used music to rewrite their bad experiences. To the girls, Jenni provided a space of sonic imaginaries (Vargas, 2012)
and pedagogies. They viewed Jenni as a “strong female role singer, who put her heart out on the songs,” “a great
helpful person for women that were abused,” and “an empowering woman who is an inspirational person.” Through
these statements the girls point us to Jenni’s life experiences of being a working-class teen mom who survived domes-
tic and sexual abuse, infidelity, depression, racism, and sexism. These themes also surfaced among the songs the girls
choose as their favorite songs in the questionnaire: “No Vas a Creer,” “Inolvidable,” “La Gran Señora,” “La Misma Gran
Señora,” “Aparecio Cuando no la Esperaba,” “A Cambio de Que,” “Dama Divina,” and “Cuando se Muere Una Dama.” All
but two songs are about relationship problems, particularly breakups and infidelity.19
For many girls, listening to Jenni’s songs about surviving “real problems” was a communal activity that allowed them
to connect with their family, particularly their mothers, aunts, and female cousins. Maria explained, “Her songs repre-
sent something she has been through on how you can be a powerful woman and shows true life problems.” Mia also
said, “I do relate to Jenni Rivera’s music ‘cause some of the things she says in her music tells my life story.” A common
practice of listening to Jenni’s music was through Spanish-language radio with family and friends. The public practice
of listening to Spanish-language radio in spaces of working-class labor such as restaurant kitchens, constructions sites,
beauty salons, and grocery markets represents “a communal, classed, and brown form of listening that differs markedly
from ‘white collar’ modes of listening, which offers more solidarity practices” (Casillas). Jenni’s voice on the radio pro-
vided girls and women a space to create women-centered forms of listening where they could talk about breakups,
empowerment, beauty, sexuality, class, race, and gender. As La Yaquesita recalls,

But the first time I heard of Jenni Rivera was in 2001 when I was in sixth grade. Like usual, my friend, Elx-
beth invited me to visit her after school to walk to the library to use the computers. When we arrived, her
mother was listening to Jenni’s song “Madre Soltera” (“Single Mother”) which she told me meant a lot to her
because she was also a single mother. Elxbeth’s mom was in the kitchen warming water for a cup of slim
green tea singing to the song with so much sentimiento. I didn’t know the lyrics of the song but I tried
to remember them to sing along with her. I wanted my voice to be a sonic sign of solidarity. I wanted to
express to her that I saw her hard work and was thankful for her being the great mother she was to my
friend and to me. She took me on as her “daughter” when my mother was gone. She was there when I had
my first heartbreak. I learned a lot from her. The little moments she spent with me, even if it was to just sing
along to “Madre Soltera” and cuss out men, were precious to me. Growing up, the girl rule was that if some-
one was heartbroken we would try to cheer them up by collectively singing songs about break ups. If they
came out in the radio, we would constantly say, “That’s my song!” Sometimes several of those songs came
up on the radio one after the other, and each time we would say, “That’s my song, put it up, put it up.” It
432 HERNANDEZ

was as if the loudness of the music would take away the pain. This would happen a lot as we were inside
a car. With Elxbeth’s mother, damn near every song was our song, especially when they were interpreted
by Jenni.

In her memory of listening to Jenni for the first time, La Yaquesita describes an active engagement with Jenni’s
music.20 She describes how this bonding moment with Elxbeth’s mom transmitted a sonic pedagogy that allowed her
to have empathy and respect for the dignity and hard work behind single motherhood and overcoming the pain and
trauma that heartbreaks and divorce can bring. Although La Yaquesita could not connect with Elxbeth’s mother or
Jenni about single motherhood or divorce, she was able to connect with them about the pain of a heartbreak and
the role music played in healing from it. Vargas states that the “emotional experience relived in a song, on the part
of audience or singer, ‘transport and elevate’ the listener to an otherwise unattainable imaginary” that “offer[s] possi-
bilities for the listener to draw on for alternative modes of desire or as a form of public testimony” (Dissonant Divas, 89).
The public testimony, conocimientos, that occurs within the consumption of Jenni’s songs allows for the transmission
of sonic pedagogies among daughter and mother and other fans. Like La Yaquesita, the reason the girls did not iden-
tify with Jenni’s life experiences was because she had been through several divorces and had five children. The girls
did, however, discuss how Jenni’s life experiences were not far away from their own since they knew someone who
had experienced similar “problems,” like domestic violence, single motherhood, and working long hours to provide for
their children. As Estrella pointed out, “I, not me but my mom, has gone through similar problems such as with men and
being a single mom, she is independent.” These comments suggest that Latina girls admired Jenni because her music
and life experience transmit sonic pedagogies, conocimientos, about motherhood and womanhood that connected them
with their own mothers or relatives. For instance, the song Estrella identified as her favorite Jenni song is “La Gran
Señora,” a song about infidelity and divorce that Jenni wrote and dedicated to her own mother. In her autobiography,
Jenni says,

Because I could do little else but stand by my mother’s side. I wrote a song called “La Gran Señora.” It is about a
woman addressing her man’s mistress and telling her, “What’s mine is mine. I won’t let go. I will defend my honor.
I am his lady.” The media all thought it was about me. I never corrected them because I didn’t want my parents’
issues to become public. When I started writing songs, I wrote about party girls and drinking and fictional drug
lords. As I grew as an artist, the songs became a way for me to work through my personal issues and send a
message. No matter how old you are, watching your parents suffer is so painful. “La Gran Señora” helped me to
process that (128).

As it did for the girls, music allowed Jenni to empathize and learn from her mother’s pain from a romantic arrebato
(Anzaldúa, 2015, would translate this as a rupture, ending, a beginning). For Jenni the song “La Gran Señora” was what
Martha Gonzalez calls sung theories, “accessible archives that can communicate embodied knowledges across time, dis-
ciplines, borders, generations, and other ways of knowing (71).” While writing, recording, and performing “La Gran
Señora,” Jenni embodied her mother’s testimonio and healed from the pain she experienced from her parents’ complex
romantic relationship, which eventually lead to a separation. I read this song as taking part in sonic pedagogy because
Jenni was very direct about using music to send a message to her girl and women fans about cheating and the pain it
can cause children. As Jenni points out, the song is about a woman addressing her man’s mistress; however, it is written
in such a way that the audience can infer that the mistress is younger, has a thin body without stretch marks, and is very
sexually active with “her man” (to the point that the woman protagonist calls her “dirty minded” in the song):

No se como entraste I do not know how you got in

No se como fue I do not know how it happened
No se que le distes para atarantarlo I do not know what you gave him to stupefy him
Lo que si te digo es que aquí somos tres What I will tell you, is that there are three of us here
HERNANDEZ 433

Y este triánguilito no me esta gustando And, I do not like the triangle we are forming
Vas a comprender You need to understand
Y respetar quien soy Respect who I am
Si no es por las buenas If it is not in good terms, then
Pues será a madrasos I will have to fight you
Se necesita más que una cara bonita You need more than a pretty face
Se necesita más que un cuerpo sin estrías You need more than a stretch mark-free body
Se necesita más que una mente perdida You need more than a lost mind
Para ser la intrusa To be the intruder
Que dé mi se ría That laughs in my face
Aunque estés viviendo en la plena juventud Even if you are living in the youngest stage of your life
Yo tengo la experiencia I have the experience
Y la familia es mía And the family is mine

When Estrella included this song in her list, I predicted that, like Jenni and La Yaquesita (with “Madre Soltera” and
Elxbeth’s mom), Estrella also played this song as a sonic symbol of solidarity to support her mother’s complex relation-
ships. During the time I was working at the high school, I intentionally wanted to have an ethnographic desconocimiento
about whether my prediction was correct, particularly because I knew about the situation, but Estrella had not shared
that information with me.21 It was not until many months later that she told me that at the time of the questionnaire
she was going through a very similar situation to the one that Jenni went through with her parents. Like Jenni, Estrella
did not know what else to do but to stand by her mother’s side and listen to the song “La Gran Señora.”
The girls’ questionnaire responses, along with Jenni’s and La Yaquesita’s testimonies, move me to read Jenni’s
music—and the girl/woman-centered spaces formed around the communal listening practice of the music—as the cre-
ation of an erotics of feminist solidarity that allowed girls the opportunity to understand, empathize, and connect with
the complex lives of their mothers, relatives, and friends. The girls teach us that these solidarity circles are possible
when girls and mothers are consuming the “productive pleasures” and sonic pedagogies transmitted by Jenni (Fiske, 40-
55). The affective and corporeal sonic bonding time between mothers, daughters, cousins, aunts, friends, and neighbors
became a form of sonic pedagogy that taught the girls how to relate to their world, men, and lovers in an empowered
way. Learning how to relate to their mothers’ conocimientos through Jenni’s voice, and the public practice of listening to
Spanish-speaking radio, highlights the notion of “productive pleasure” as central to teaching survival skills, which are
not separate or excluded from these pedagogies.22 According to the girls these productive pleasures grew with Jenni’s
reality shows.

3 JENNI REALITY TV: BONDING TIME AND MOTHER–DAUGHTER

UNDERSTANDINGS

I watched her show ‘cause it was fun and it made me feel good ‘cause she loved her kids so much and she would
show it all the time.
—Mia

It’s a fun show to watch her show made me feel, I don’t know, umm like having a better day.
—Monica

Watching Jenni’s television shows was also a common activity among the high-school girls I worked with. In fact,
all of the girls who participated in my research watched the reality show I Love Jenni, which debuted on the Spanish-
language cable network station Mun2 (NBC-Telemundo) on March 5, 2011 and ended on August 11, 2013 after Jenni’s
434 HERNANDEZ

death (Mitchell, 2013). As a “reality star sitcom,” I Love Jenni documented Jenni’s singing career and her life with her
family.23 The show brands Jenni as a middle-class Chicana who successfully achieved, and is maintaining, the Ameri-
can dream of living in a million-dollar home while staying true to her “Mexican roots.” In I Love Jenni, the Rivera fam-
ily speak to each other in English and at times in Spanglish; it is only when Jenni or her kids communicate with their
grandparents, the Spanish-speaking media, or her monolingual fans that they switch over to speak mostly in Spanish.
Communication scholars Viviana Rojas and Juan Piñón have argued that television networks like Mun2 have “engaged
in the construction of bilingual and bicultural audiences with linguistic models that break away from the traditional
Spanish/English language binary established several decades ago by Univision and Telemundo” (1). Some of the scenes
in season 1 and 2 include: Edward James Olmos invitation to Jenni to act in the movie Filly Brown, Jenni’s purchase of
a taco truck to start a new business, glamour shots for the cover of Latina magazine, community service at a women
shelter, a family strip-pole dance class, and Jenni’s concert at Pechanga Casino.
By the end of its third season I Love Jenni had become the number-one show among Latina adults and women ages
18–30 (Mitchell, 2013). The girls in this study correlated the high ratings of I Love Jenni to the representation of single
motherhood, mother–daughter interactions, barrio solidarity, and concert performances. What I found to be significant
about the reception of I Love Jenni among the girls I worked with was the context of their viewing. The girls conveyed
the affective and corporeal pleasure of watching the show next to their family members (particularly mothers). Yanel
said, “Watched it with my mother. She always being happy trying to be with her family but needs to work at times. Her
family always being together uniting with each other.” For Yanel watching the show became a bonding activity with her
mother. This act of bonding is particularly important in single-mother-led, working-class households in which mothers
have no other option but to work long hours to provide for their families. These rare bonding times are very precious
to girls because they enabled a space for older fans, in Yanel’s case her mother, to also share their own conocimientos
about life with the girls.
Based on the girls’ responses and my own personal encounters with the shows, I contend that the televisual com-
ponent of Jenni’s singing career enhanced a multilayered fan culture between existing fans. The spectatorship of these
shows created a space where instruction about Jenni and her fans (both daughters and mothers) could be discussed
and transmitted. The inclusion of and focus on Jenni’s daughters in these shows allowed the girls the opportunity to
also share their own conocimientos of girlhood with their mothers.
Reality television scholars often acknowledge the “distance between reality and the real,” and they have debated
elements of the form (i.e., trash TV, hybrid style, lower cost, democratization), including performance, gender, race,
class, sex, voyerurism into illicit excesses, and realness as a commodity value (Weber, 17). However, these girls insisted
that I Love Jenni was very real to them because they were able to relate to at least one of the characters.24 When asked
about why she watched the show, Maria responded, “It was because it showed you how true she and her family was.
They had troubles in life like everyone else.” A factor in the trueness that these girls identified on screen correlates
to the girls’ claim to a particular intimacy with the gendered social spaces that Jenni navigated. This spatial intimacy
with Jenni was possible because she constantly gave shout-outs to Long Beach (Playa Larga as she called it) in her songs
and reality show. For instance, in the third episode of I Love Jenni, titled “Back to Her Roots,” Jenni takes her children
to the garage where she used to live in Long Beach. Watching scenes like these allowed the girls to acquire a spatial
intimacy with Jenni, which was a major component of their pride and fandom for her. Sofia said, “I loved it [the reality
show because] I felt like I knew her I [also] feel that her songs [and reality show] connect with many of us because she
is a native from Long Beach, and she has been around the stuff we been through.” Sofia’s comment also references the
success Jenni obtained mixing both the “aural-visual forms of the televisual discourse” to obtain intergenerational fans
(Hall, 92). Years before I Love Jenni aired on Mun2, Jenni had established herself as a singer with roots in Long Beach.
For instance, the cover of her 2006 album, Mi Vida Loca (which was produced like a sonic reality show album because
she narrates pieces of her life and family members as an intro to each song), shows Jenni dressed in blue jeans and a
white hoodie sweater, with Nike Cortez tennis shoes, silver hoop earrings, and her Long Beach hat. The embodiment of
this regional aesthetic and shout-outs to Long Beach in her music made Jenni’s sonic pedagogies easier to consume for
the girls.25
HERNANDEZ 435

Prior to I Love Jenni, Mun2 had premiered another show about the Rivera family titled Jenni Rivera Presents: Chiquis
and Raqc, which premiered Saturday July 3, 2010.26 In this reality show the main protagonists were Jenni’s daughter,
Chiquis Rivera, and radio host Raquel Cordova, known as Raqc. Based on the content of the episodes, including the
theme song of the show, “I Can Be Anything,” the targeted audience for the show was Latina girls. Although the girls’
comments point us primarily to I Love Jenni, I end this section with a close reading of a scene from the show Chiquis and
Raqc because it served as an intertext to I Love Jenni.27 By the time Mun2 premiered I Love Jenni, Jenni’s performance
in Chiquis and Raqc as a mother, business woman, and mentor/role model for teen moms played a role in the success of I
Love Jenni.28
For example, in the episode of Chiquis and Raqc titled “Big Aspirations,” Jenni and her daughters speak to a group
of graduating teen mothers. In this visit, Jenni asks the girls, “What are you planning on doing for your future?” A
Latina girl, holding a baby in her lap, responds, “Well, I am already going to college right now so I don’t know, but I
need to be something big for my baby since I am not with his dad. I feel that I need to show him that I don’t need
a guy to do all those things.” Jenni then shares her life story with the girls, telling them that she was once in their
situation, but that with hard work and education she was able to succeed: “I made a mistake of becoming pregnant,
but I thank God that it happened in my life because if I had not been pregnant maybe I wouldn’t have been a strug-
gler, a hustler, and I hustled and I worked hard because I have my children. Now it is not a mistake, it is a blessing.
Although it may be hard, it is a blessing.” Jenni’s statement indicates that she is cognizant that to some individuals,
she exemplifies a common stereotype about Latinas: the unwed teen mom. Yet, she takes ownership of those expe-
riences and understands them as life lessons that made her stronger. She demonstrates pride and agency in having
a complex girlhood that prepared her to overcome some of the struggles she would later face as a woman. Jenni
ends her motivational talk by saying, “Just like you have your children in your laps right now, I had them and look
at them [pointing to her daughters]. You don’t want to be statistics. You do your best mija. Don’t let anything, or
anybody stop you.”29 After her speech, the program displays a b-roll of mothers and daughters crying as they take
photos with Jenni. Jenni’s charla with the girls inspires them to succeed despite the odds that some people might
want to see them fail. She gives them a strategic warning about what awaits them as working-class Latina girls.
When she says, “Don’t let anything or anybody stop you,” she is alerting them to the fact that as women, particu-
larly women of color, they will encounter racial and gender discrimination and discouragement from pursuing their
goals.
This scene is intriguing for two reasons. First, Jenni’s method of engaging with the girls is also in a charla style,
like the ones my participants and I engaged in. Jenni’s usage of it emphasizes the importance of this methodol-
ogy, as it has a down-home vibe compared to a speech or formal interview. Second, Jenni also gives her daugh-
ters, Jackie and Chiquis, an opportunity to share their own conocimientos. This emphasizes the teachings from
both daughters and mothers about girlhood and womanhood. Because of scenes like these, my participants also
related to Jenni’s daughters, who were in their early twenties during the airing of I Love Jenni and Chiquis and
Raqc. For instance, Jenni’s older daughter Janney Rivera, affectionately referred to as Chiquis, was also the sec-
436 HERNANDEZ

ond mother of her household; she stayed home and took care of her siblings, for which she was celebrated and
admired in the reality show. Since these responsibilities—the care work provided by older daughters to younger
siblings—are oftentimes overlooked by mainstream media, the girls appreciated that a network like Mun2 gave
Jenni television space to highlight their day-to-day experiences. As the baby-sitter of the household, Estrella—like
Chiquis—was also the second mother to her siblings. As the reality show points out and Estrella shared with me,
this kind of adult responsibility makes girls mature at a very young age because they are not just accountable for
themselves.
The reception of the reality show allowed the girls an opportunity to connect with the popular music artist they
admire, and see for themselves the conocimientos that influenced Jenni to write, sing, and perform her songs. In
addition, the show allowed the girls an opportunity to see Jenni before, during, and after the concerts. Without
the reality show, the girls might not have been able to establish as intimate a connection with Jenni. Due to their
age, these young girls faced age restrictions at some of the venues where Jenni performed. For instance, in South-
ern California, Jenni often performed in casinos that do not admit girls under the age of 21. As such, the reality
shows, as well as social media sites like Twitter and YouTube, open up different venues for young girls to nurture
their love not only for Jenni’s music, but for Jenni herself. Certainly, with her reality shows Jenni Rivera had little
divas-in-training.

By the time I Love Jenni and Chiquis and Raqc premiered on Mun2, I was an undergraduate in college. I didn’t
have cable in my apartment so I had to visit different friends to watch the show. This show was my weekly plea-
sure! Every time we watched, it felt like a party, except when season three came up, we constantly cried knowing
that Jenni was not alive anymore. Most of my friends have children so their little girls would also be there watch-
ing the show with us. You would have mothers, daughters, granddaughters, and primas (cousins) there. With my
friend Sonia, her daughter Amanda, for instance, always mimicked everything Jenni did. She danced like Jenni,
threw the west sign like Jenni, and sang along to Jenni. We always laughed at how cute she looked. When Sonia
and I related to the show, we always talked about it, and told each other how similar or different it was in our
case. During these moments Amanda would stay still and pay close attention to us. She was little but some-
how knew everything we were saying. Sonia even came out during one of the I Love Jenni episodes. Sonia was
not from Long Beach, so every time something about Long Beach came up in the show I would always tell her
“see that’s why I am a G (gangsta), no one can mess with us, don’t try me cause we from Playa Larga baby!”
(La Yaquesita)

4 FEMINIST SONIC BOOTCAMP: LITTLE DIVAS IN TRAINING

The anecdotes in this study teach us that the consumption of Jenni’s persona through music, radio, and televi-
sion helped fans create a women-centered space where daughters and mothers could transmit sonic pedagogies of
working-class struggles, motherhood, girlhood, race, and sexuality. I framed sonic pedagogies through consumption
because it recognizes that although the girls’ engagement with Jenni happens through mediated sources like televi-
sion, radio, and the music industry, that does not mean that her teachings are not significant, or that they create a
less feminist space. On the contrary, these girls remind us of their “creative genius” and encourage us to not disregard
the powerful sonic pedagogies that are decoded from the affective and corporeal consumption of Jenni-related media
(Hall, 1993).
Latina girls continue to remember Jenni on a day-to-day basis by appearing in mobile recordings uploaded to
YouTube by their family members, thus creating musical archives of their everyday consumption and performative
practices of Rivera’s music.30 Even preteen girls who are not Long Beach natives listen to, watch, and perform Jenni
from the comfort of their living rooms while their mothers (aunts, cousins, grandmothers) watch, laugh, and cheer them
on. On June 10, 2013, Geraldine Zambrano uploaded a video titled “Niña cantando como jenni rivera” (Girl singing like
HERNANDEZ 437

FIGURE 1 YouTube video of a girl fan Performing Chuper Amigos

Jenni Rivera). In it, we see Livier, a girl who appears to be about five years old, in a living room standing in front of the
television, where the family is watching a video recording of Jenni performing the song “Chuper Amigos” live.31 Livier
mimics every move that Jenni makes. She starts by raising her hands up in the air, and then with one hand she makes
a fist and pretends that her fist is the microphone (Figure 1). Thirty seconds into the video, you can hear a woman in
the background saying “baila como ella, la nalga, la nalga” (dance like her, the butt, the butt), and Livier moves her butt
more. When Jenni is shown raising her cup, you hear the same woman in the background instructing Livier to get a cup
and drink from it. Livier performs the entire song, which is five minutes and twenty-five seconds long, while women’s
laughter can be heard in the background. The mothers’ laughter is sonic evidence that their little divas are in training,
and are undergoing a feminist sonic boot camp that is instilling in them a musical identity that their mothers did not
have access to at their age.
It appears that Latina girls on YouTube, performing Jenni’s music, constitute a space of pleasure that allows them
to negotiate the social marginalization stemming from their race, age, gender, class, and sexuality. It also appears that
these interactions occur in spaces of nonjudgment where women laugh with their daughters and can express anything
they wish through impromptu comments about sexuality, pleasure, and sentimental relationships. In the process, the
mothers are transmitting to their daughters sonic lessons about confidence, self-love, and zero-tolerance for domestic
abuse—lessons that they themselves probably did not learn as girls.

NOTES
1I mention popularity because there were and continue to be many more women who also obtain local success in this genre
(Mexican regional music: banda and norteño) but due to issues in the music industry they do not obtain mainstream success.
I strongly believe that these other women artists are as important as Jenni, and should be written about too. I do not want
to fall into the “exceptional exemption” process that sociologist Deborah Vargas talks about in Dissonant Divas (2012), which
refers to the process of historical gender politics that only narrate the stories of women who have reached a high level of
success and recognition.
2 Throughout the essay, I use Jenni Rivera’s first name to refer to her. I do this as a form of respect, love and fandom. More
importantly, Jenni is the way the girls refer to her.
3
For more information on Plaza Mexico and its historical significance please see: Jorge N. Leal’s chapter, “Las Plazas of South
Los Angeles” in Post-Ghetto: Reimagining South Los Angeles.
438 HERNANDEZ

4
The Chicana identity was apparent when she sang songs like “Chicana/Jaliscience” and when she reinterpreted oldie songs
with banda such as “Angel Baby,” “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” and “When the Next Tear Drops.” The documentary Al
Otro Lado by Natalia Almada also captures this Chicana paisa identity. Moreover, in her essay tittle “Jenni Rivera- La Chicana
de La Banda” Chicana Artivista Felicia Montes also uses the term “ranchola” to describe cholas that like the rancho. You can
see her “Ranchola Blues” Video Poem at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN44BNhfJDY.
5 Alejandra Elenes also demonstrates in her research that “it is important to analyze pedagogy in its function as a cultural prac-

tice in or outside educational settings” (5). To read other scholars who have theorized the pedagogical roles of Chicana/o cul-
tural production, please see Alejandra Elenes’s term “border/transformative pedagogies” in Transformative Borders: Chicana/o
Popular Culture and Pedagogy and M. Jacqui Alexander’s theorization of pedagogies as a methodology and the importance of
embodiment in Pedagogies of Crossing: Mediations on Feminisms, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred.
6
Self-identifying as a paisa also means claiming a particular working-class style of Mexicanidad.
7 Ms. Guzman was also raised in Long Beach and was also an alumna of the high school where the study was conducted. This
was important because even our charlas in the classroom were intergenerational.
8 The charlas approach draws from Chicana feminist methodologies that emphasize and prioritize the comfort and confiden-
tiality of interview participants (Abarca, 2006). As a ground-up method, charlas are not as formal as interviews and empower
and recognize the participants as producers of knowledge. Abarca also draws from Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book Decolonizing
Methodologies (1999) and agrees about the power in storytelling as a methodology.
9 El Gordo y La Flaca is a Spanish-language entertainment news show that appears weekdays on the television network Univi-

sion. The main focus of the show is to capture the gossip of artists, celebrities, and musicians. According to Tomas Ybarra-
Frausto, rasquachismo is a working-class aesthetic that can be resourceful, excessive, ironic, and highly metaphoric.
10 Lisa Lowe also writes about chisme “gossip” in her Immigrant Acts: on Asian American Cultural Politics (13-14).

11
I intentionally did not record the charlas nor pursue more thorough interviews with the girls at that moment because I knew
that if a sensitive topic emerged during that process I would have to report it. Ethically, I preferred to engage in those con-
versations after they graduated from high school. To me these girls were not temporary “research subjects.” I saw them as
friends with whom I would later interact because we navigated the same social spaces outside of school. I saw and continue
to see them as theorists of culture who have a lot to teach us about girlhood studies, music, gender, race, class, and sexuality.
12 It is important to note that there are several Salvadorians that also identify as paisas. The politics behind this at the high
school were complicated particularly because some Central American students strongly believed that Mexican music domi-
nated southern California so some were resistant to it, but during presentations of my work I have had some Central Ameri-
can students come up to me and tell “I am not Mexican and I am a paisa too, I listen to that music.”
13
It is worth noting that Jenni does have boy fans, and in a similar way, the boy fans I have met during my ethnographic research
become Jenni’s fans through the influence of their mothers’, aunts’, or sisters’ fandom.
14 If I was serious about the methodologies of women of color that are grounded on testimonio, auto ethnography, charlas, and
archisme then I needed to include my own story especially because during the charlas with the girls and Ms. Guzman, I did
talk about myself, too, because the purpose of charlas is to have an even exchange. I could not expect the girls to open up to
me if I did not. Charlas allow for the reciprocity of knowledge.
15
Other women of color who have inspired me and given me the courage to use this methodology are Jillian Hernandez, Robin
M. Boylorn, Ruth Nicole Brown, and more broadly the methodologies from the Women Who Rock Oral History Project.
In a similar vein to autoethnography, Gloria Anzaldúa’s methodologies of autohistoria and autohistoria-teoria, have helped
me view writing as “a gesture of the body” that “is grounded not on incorporeal abstraction but on corporeal realities” and
allows me to create a hybrid genre that fuses “personal narrative with theoretical discourse, autobiographical vignettes with
theoretical pose” (Light in the Dark, 5).
16
For more information on “creative genius,” see Ruth Nicole Brown, Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood.
Also, because I want to preserve the girls’ text, the responses used throughout the article were not edited. I copied the
responses verbatim from the questionnaire and/or from transcript. I believe that the girls’ verbatim responses give us access
to how they express the meanings they make about consuming
17
For more information on the theorization of bumping, please see Yessica Garcia Hernandez “Bumping Corridos: Broadcast-
ing a Proud Paisa Identity while Cruising,” in possession of author. In her work about Jenni, sociologist Marietta Morrissey
elaborates that Jenni’s 2005 album Parrandera, Rebelde y Atrevida “is considered to be the most typical of her angry woman
theme and style” (416).
18 Anita Tijerina Revilla defines chingona as “a term that signifies power—a ‘bad ass’ or strong woman.” In her essay, “Muxerista

Pedagogy: Raza Womyn Teaching Social Justice Through Student Activism,” she describes how “this term is highly contested
amongst Raza Womyn because some feel that the root word ‘chingar,’ which translates into ‘to fuck,’ continues to signify
patriarchal notions of power” (90). In this context, chingona means a strong, fierce woman. In fact, Raúl Alcaraz Ochoa has
written an essay in which he defines Jenni Rivera’s feminism as “Feminismo Chingona” (2013).
HERNANDEZ 439

19
The other two songs are about the pride of being a curvy/plus size woman and Jenni’s death wishes (a song that became
very popular after her death). The reference to the song “Dama Divina” suggests that some of the girls identified with Jenni’s
body, which was often criticized by the media for being gorda (fat). As Deborah Parédez points out in Selenidad: Selena, Latinos,
and The Performance of Memory, Latina women also identified with Selena Quintanilla’s body, particularly Selena’s skin and
butt. Parédez states, “Identification with Selena’s body often provided Latinas a way to expose the racism embedded in the
double bind of excess and erasure circumscribing representations of Latina sexuality” (136). Similar to Selena, I contend that
Latina/Chicana girls and women also identified with the body of Jenni because it “craft[ed] versions of Latina femininity,
sexuality, and style that did not conform to dominant (white) standards for feminine beauty” (Parédez 136). The theme of
gordita pride in Jenni Rivera music and reality shows is an area that I explore in my larger project.
20
In Listening to Salsa, Aparicio (202-3) also describes how, for working-class women, listening to salsa was a more active
engagement. She also underscores the important role mothers have in the passing on of cultural and national traditions.
21 Gloria Anzaldúa defines desconocimiento as “the ignorance we cultivate to keep ourselves from knowledge so that we can
remain unaccountable” (Light in the Dark, 2).
22
Another important point to recognize is that aside from connecting with their own mothers’ stories, listening to Jenni
allowed the girls a space to deal with “real problems” of their own generation, which tend to be about how to navigate the
United States as a second generation Mexicana/Latina. Ethnomusicologist Sydney Hutchinson has observed that youth have
responded to anti-immigrant sentiment through music and dancing. Although most of her fieldwork took place in Tucson,
Hutchinson briefly visited Los Angeles in the spring of 2005 to conduct ethnographic research (23). One of her research
questions was “why Mexican regional music was becoming increasingly important among Mexican Americans, both as a
category and in its specific manifestations.” In her study, Hutchinson shows that Mexican youth danced banda, particularly
through quebradita, to deal with “cultural difference and culture clash and [as] a way to create positive and forward-thinking
expressions from border situations” (11). Similar to other forms of Latinx music and fandom (e.g. Salsa, Bachata, rock-en-
español, boleros, Tex-Mex, cumbias, Merengue), [within the context of Latina/o migration, listening to [our parent’s music]
becomes a reaffirmation of a minority culture within the United States” (Aparicio, P.190; Anguiano, 2012; Arellano, 2013). In
the high school where this study took place, there have been different generations of paisa crews that merely focus on orga-
nizing house parties, carne asadas, and other social gatherings for their members with live music like banda and norteño. In an
interview for the Estrella TV tribute video, Inolvidable, Don Cheto, a radio host for La Que Buena, explained that Jenni’s music
brought together second-generation girls who were “not cholas persay” but were part of clubs (party crews) that liked corri-
dos from Chalino Sanchez, El Gavilansillo, Los Rivera, and other artists from Sinaloa. The girl audience Don Cheto describes
identified with Jenni because she was from the barrio (hood) and spoke more English than Spanish, but they enjoyed listening
to Jenni, a singer in the genre of banda and corridos. Don Cheto’s observations about Jenni’s second-generation girl listeners
explains why the television station Mun2 would agree to produce a reality show around her life.
23
Jennifer Gillan (2004) uses the term “reality star sitcom” to capture the “new subgenre combination of Reality TV surveil-
lance filming and fast-paced editing, the sitcom’s focus on internal family roles, and the celebrity interview show’s emphasis
on the interplay between everyday social roles and star personalities and images.” Moreover, it is worth noting that the title
of the show is a play on I Love Lucy.
24 See Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn (2004); Brenda Weber (2014); Beverly Skeggs and Helen Wood (2012); Lynne Joyrich,

Misha Kavka, and Brenda Weber (2015); and Brenda Weber (2009). In regards to representation of single mothers in cin-
ema, Angharad Valdivia has stated that Hollywood films portray single mothers as either “good moms”—those who are
middle-class stay-at-home moms, have patience, are understanding/rational, and become single through the death of a
spouse or through abandonment by their husband—or “Bad Moms” those who become single mothers through divorce
and experience more “sexual activity or the lack of it as a conflict” (59). Jenni’s experience as a single mother in the
show is complex and that was the reason the girls liked her. Regardless of her raunchy personality, a trait that according
to Valdivia would classify her as a “bad mother,” the girls described her as a very good mother. It is true that, between
the shows Chiquis and Raqc and I Love Jenni, Jenni is no longer a “single parent” (her wedding with baseball player Este-
ban Loiza, makes her part of a “nuclear family” again), but she continues to refer to her single mother years as a form of
teaching.
25
Another factor in this may be Jenni’s executive producer role in the reality show.
26 In fact, the idea of I Love Jenni emerged because the ratings for Chiquis and Raqc increased tremendously during Jenni’s
appearances on the show, an outcome the network was not expecting. The producers wanted Chiquis to be the main pro-
tagonist because they assumed that because she was younger, she would attract the young audiences that they were going
for. What they did not expect was that Jenni mediated relationships between older and younger audiences.
27 Marsha Kinder underscores that media scholars understand intertextuality as “any individual text (whether an artwork like

a movie or novel, or a more commonplace text like a newspaper article, billboard, or casual verbal remark) which is a part of
a larger cultural discourse and therefore must be read in relationship to other texts and their diverse textual strategies and
ideological assumptions” (1991, 2).
440 HERNANDEZ

28
In “Un Desmadre Positivo” Deborah Vargas uses the term “played” to describe how Jenni Rivera hustled the music industry.
In this article I add that she also played the television network to her advantage.
29 Jenni’s charla could be interpreted as a conservative message that characterizes teen pregnancy as a “mistake,” and also as
a neoliberal message that promises automatic success through hard work despite the structures of gender, class, and racial
inequalities. In fact, Brenda Weber documents that other scholars “have demonstrated [that] the tie between neoliberalism
and Reality TV is insistent since so many of the lessons of Reality TV reinforce a broader logic of independent entrepreneuri-
alism that requires the good citizen to commit to projects of the self” (2014, 7). However, I propose an alternative read-
ing that interprets Jenni’s discussion as recognizing the specificities of her age, class, ethnicity, and gender, thus moving
beyond common discourses about Latina single mothers. When Jenni admonishes the girls by saying, “You don’t want to
be a statistic,” she is not referring to their pregnancy, but rather, to their ability to continue strong in life despite their
circumstances.
30 YouTube is definitely another site for Jenni’s archisme. In Learning from YouTube, Alexandra Juhasz shows us how YouTube is
“the subject form, method, problem and solution.” See http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/learningfromyoutube/
31
For an analysis of chuperamigos please see Yessica Garcia-Hernandez, “Intoxication as Feminist Pleasure: Drinking, Dancing,
and Un-Dressing for/with Jenni Rivera” (2016).

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