As a child, Jenni Rivera knew she wanted to be a performer. She was smart, talented and pretty, almost a baby face, but she was SO street. A Latina growing up in tough, workingclass, multicultural neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area, and throughout her life right up to the very end, she was a fighter. She’d fight girls as well as boys, women and men, with fists and objects and words. As she describes in her autobiography, trouble always seemed to find her, manifested in bad choices of boyfriends and husbands (very bad, in some cases), misplaced trust, and just plain negative s***.A memorable passage in Unbreakable describes a teen mom, with a 3-year-old daughter and pregnant with a second child, no dad in the picture, living in a converted garage, no car, getting up at 4 a.m. getting herself and her daughter ready, securing the little girl in the child seat on a ten-speed bicycle, and then peddling to the child care center, then across town to her community college classes, and then to her job. And dreaming of being a performer.Improbably, she rose from these unglamorous beginnings to become “the most acclaimed Spanish-language singer in the United States.” This young mother became a powerful force in Mexican American culture, playing to sold out crowds at Staples Center, Gibson Amphitheater, and other venues in Los Angeles.Her popularity spread across the country (and in Mexico), and her story—the tough Chicana from Long Beach, California, who raised five kids with or without fathers around, the obstacles she overcame, (more than a few of her own making) and her songs, composed and recorded in popular Mexican music styles—resonated profoundly with Latino audiences, particularly women. They adored her. Later, in addition to musical enterprises, she starred in reality television shows, and was beginning a movie career when, in December of 2012, she was killed in a plane crash in Mexico on her way to a performance. She was 43.Unbreakable is, of course, a show business autobiography, released after her death, and there is a lot of promotional b.s. that I’m sure was added by other hands. And the book is explicit in its descriptions of events and relationships. Jenni Rivera’s ritmo and style in her music is not necessarily evident on every page of the book, but her life is a hell of a story.