Coming on strong again

For someone who just spent years in prison proclaiming her innocence in connection with Latin America’s most sensational celebrity sex scandal, Gloria Trevi is wearing a skirt that seems scandalously short. The recently freed Mexican pop star is about to perform on an “American Idol”-type television program, with contestants almost as young and hungry for fame as the underage women she was accused of luring into a bizarre cult of sex, sadism and rock en espanol.

The show will be live. That’s a dangerous scenario for Trevi, once known for wild concerts during which she poured fizzing Coke down her crotch and pulled men from the audience to disrobe them seductively before beating them with their own belts to give them a taste of their own machismo.

Her sexually charged antics and enormous popularity during the ‘90s alarmed Mexican conservatives and panicked many parents whose daughters had started dressing and acting like little Trevis, the way Madonna clones did in that corrupting country to the north. The critics let up only when the notorious female rocker was safely behind bars on charges that she and Sergio Andrade, her ex-manager and alleged Svengali, had raped, kidnapped and abused a harem of teenage celebrity wannabes.

But now she’s back, released from a Chihuahua prison in September by a Mexican judge for lack of evidence. Eager to make up for lost time and lost wealth, Trevi immediately launched the comeback she started plotting back in her jail cell.

The singer and her new record producer, Armando Avila, got a jump on recording her new CD by turning a prison sewing room into a makeshift studio, improving the acoustics by lining the walls with mattresses used for conjugal visits. The pop/rock album “Como Nace El Universo” (How the Universe Is Born) was released in December by Trevi’s longtime label, BMG (now merged with Sony). And Trevi has hit the road with her 23-city Trevolution concert tour, which drew almost 12,000 fans in Mexico City last week and which comes to the Universal Amphitheatre on April 22.

As always, the latest developments in her real-life soap opera have divided the public, with loyal fans cheering the latest plot twist and critics growing increasingly weary of her act. Yet times have changed, and so has she.

Trevi is now 36 and a single mother, not the same wild woman who wore ripped stockings and Medusa hair in her hell-bent campaign to shock society. Besides, it’s hard to imagine how anybody could still shock a country like modern Mexico, where porn magazines are peddled openly at street-corner kiosks, talk shows aping Jerry Springer abound on television, and female pop stars like Paulina Rubio gratuitously flaunt their bodies, sans Trevi’s social message.

Trevi will have to somehow reinvent herself, says veteran critic Oscar Sarquiz. The old rebellious attitude would “now seem not only obsolete but ridiculous,” he says. And that girlish freshness, once a big selling point, would be hard to swallow in light of the scandal.

“Right now she’s standing on the proverbial barrel,” says Sarquiz, who writes for Rolling Stone in Mexico. “If she pulls it off, she’ll amaze us all again. But it’s going to be very easy for her to fall.”

Judging from her sophisticated new album, Trevi has evolved artistically and intends to be taken seriously as singer and songwriter. Still, feeling vindicated and suddenly cut loose, there’s no telling what to expect from la Atrevida, the Daring One.

For starters, that cute yellow miniskirt signals trouble. Backstage at the theater, Trevi briefly worries about the intimate view she’ll surely flash to young men in the front rows of the theater in this Puerto Rican capital, where TeleFutura’s “Objetivo Fama” is being broadcast. But she shrugs it off with a sly smile that suggests she doesn’t mind giving her audience a little thrill.

In the dressing room, with its stained carpet, plastic patio chairs and supermarket salami-and-cheese hors d’oeuvres, Trevi seems almost meditative. She sits motionless facing a mirror, a luxury she didn’t have in jail. The once-wealthy star spent four years, eight months and eight days in cells no bigger than this cramped camerino, sometimes with just a hole in the ground for a toilet. She learned to live with physical discomfort, focusing instead on some inner strength that helped her transcend her misfortunes. .

Once onstage, however, Trevi is transformed. She twirls on her high heels and romps to the catchy beat of “Eres Un Santo” (You’re a Saint), a song from the new album about her fanatical devotion to a man everybody warns her against. At one point she heads to a table at the side of the stage where four seated judges have been watching impassively. She then scoots up onto the glass tabletop, ignoring any lingering inhibitions about the miniskirt. Reclining seductively, she flirts like a lap dancer with a middle-age judge, who smiles sheepishly. Then, just as smoothly, she slips off the table, swiping the judge’s water glass on the way down.

Turning her back, she insolently flips the water over her shoulder. And right on beat, she dramatically smashes the empty glass on the floor and sends pieces scattering across the stage.

The crowd loves it. And so does the producer.

“She took the show to another level. She hypnotized the people,” exclaimed executive producer Ende Vega, squeezing through the still buzzing hallways backstage.

Back in her dressing room, Trevi is composed again, graciously taking questions from a parade of reporters. Why did she break the glass, they want to know.

“At one point, I looked over and saw the table of judges, and they looked so serious,” Trevi replies, with a coyness that softens her sarcasm. “I figured, since they’re part of the scenery, they should make themselves useful. And since I’ve just come from a whole scene of stuffy judges, I wanted to break something on one of them.”

In Spanish, everybody understands her double-entendre: “Queria romperle algo a un juez.” What she wanted to break was, well, their manhood, their machismo, their mastery over her life.

It was all vintage Trevi. “I don’t like the word ‘victim,’ ” she would say later during an interview, “because I think of a victim as somebody who’s been run over and who will never get up again. Maybe I came out of this injured, but now I’m cured, I’m healthy, I’m free and I’m remaking my life, looking forward. I don’t feel at all like a victim. I feel like a survivor.”

A superstar shunning convention

For most of the past decade, Trevi was Mexico’s hottest cultural phenomenon: adored by fans, condemned by the Catholic Church, admired by intellectuals, banned by some radio stations and, after her arrest, championed by some journalists as a cause celebre.

Trevi was not the first female artist in Mexico to shatter stereotypes and assault sacred cows. But she was the first one to do it and achieve superstardom. When she burst on the scene in 1990 with her first album, “Que Hago Aqui?” (What Am I Doing Here?), Trevi shucked all the conventional hit formulas for female artists. Instead she developed an anti-glamour aesthetic and sang about adolescent defiance, abortion, suicide, political apathy and the macho obsession with motherhood and virginity.

Her outspoken, anti-establishment rants hit home for millions of Mexicans subjected for decades to a repressive political system and an autocratic entertainment industry, both of which decided what was best for the masses.

Love her or hate her, Trevi always managed to be the focus of attention. Her albums sold millions, her films broke box-office records and her sexy, satirical calendars kept cash registers ringing year-round, with copies secretly coveted even by her detractors. At the peak of her popularity in the mid-’90s, Trevimania had boomed into a one-woman industry, with Trevi TV specials, Trevi comics and Trevi boutiques -- the sole surviving store is in West Hollywood and today stocks primarily memorabilia. The scandal -- which broke in 1998 with the publication of a tell-all book by one of Andrade’s former teenage brides -- just added fuel to Trevi’s cultural bonfire. People followed every development in the case as if it were a telenovela too weird to be believed.

The sordid revelations of group sex. The multiple pregnancies among the girls in Andrade’s harem. The clan’s international pursuit by Interpol. The capture in Brazil in January 2000 shortly after the mysterious death of Trevi’s first baby. The long battle against extradition. The baffling birth of Trevi’s second baby in a high-security Brazilian prison. Finally, the singer’s repatriation to face trial, infant son in her arms.

But Trevi herself could not have written a better ending -- her triumphal return. Now it was her fortitude, her indomitable spirit, that captured the imagination of her fans and a fawning press.

Trevi had reinvented herself, all right. She was now some sort of saint, pictured angelically on the cover of her album in a pose that evoked the Sacred Heart, a Catholic image of suffering and redemption. Expropriating the image was bound to spark more outrage, but Trevi joked that the cover could be used as a holy sticker “when they canonize me.”

Martyr or monster, the singer had emerged from her trial by fire somehow stronger, more defiant and, to everyone’s amazement, more stunning than ever.

“If they had taken my talent like they took everything else, it would be a lot harder to console myself,” Trevi says. “But I’ve come out of this with my creativity more ablaze than ever, writing better songs, singing with more emotion, and feeling more beautiful. Not saying that I am, just that I feel it.”

Endless stream of commentary

Sometimes it seems that Mexico is obsessed by La Atrevida. She is the subject of more than half a dozen books, including an autobiography written in prison, three tell-all tomes from her accusers and three accounts from journalists, two in Spanish and one in English. The Internet is flooded with Trevi scandal sites, complete with photos of the alleged victims holding babies said to be fathered by Andrade.

Yet even basic facts about Trevi’s life -- her age, family background and socioeconomic status -- are contradicted in media accounts. Trevi and her mother offer the following:

Gloria de Los Angeles Trevino Ruiz was born on Feb. 15, 1968, in Monterrey, a major industrial center in northern Mexico and now a mecca for rock en espanol. She was the oldest of five siblings raised in the comfortable middle-class home of Gloria Ruiz, a ballet teacher, and Manuel Trevino, an architect.

She got her first break in show business when she won a lookalike contest for the character played by singer Lucero in the popular soap opera “Chispita.” That won her a scholarship to study at the performing arts school operated by Televisa, Mexico’s major television network.

It also led to her first contact with Andrade, Lucero’s producer and much older suitor. Known as Mr. Midas for his success with young female singers, Andrade was recruiting candidates for a new girl group to be named Boquitas Pintadas (Little Lipsticked Mouths). Boquitas made one record and disbanded. Trevi was 18 and at a crossroads. Her mother encouraged her to forget show business and return home. But Trevi insisted she wanted to stay in Mexico City and give it another try.

The disagreement led to a falling out, and to a song on her first album that crystallized her defiant persona: “Today I’m leaving home / Running barefoot / Let’s see who can corral me / Let’s see who can catch me.”

Trevi says she spent some time scrounging to support herself in the capital, singing on buses for spare change and selling a fast-food quesadilla creation. Desperate, she finally went to see her old producer with several new songs she had written in a notebook. Andrade saw her potential as a soloist and promised to make her a star.

After her 1990 debut, Trevi made five hit albums in five years. The Trevi-Andrade juggernaut seemed unstoppable.

Trevi had come along on the eve of enormous change in Mexico, when political and cultural monopolies were starting to collapse and the public push for openness (apertura) was everywhere. But her emergence was not an isolated phenomenon, says George Lipsitz, professor of American studies at UC Santa Cruz.

“The ‘90s gave birth to this whole group of women -- from Lynda Trang Dai, a Vietnamese American, to Patra and Lady Saw in Jamaica -- who wanted to take over sexuality for themselves [and] take control over images that had been used to belittle and demean women,” Lipsitz says. “Like Madonna, [they] sort of made you feel you could have your cake and eat it too. That you could be beautiful and glamorous and pursued by men, and still be in control.”

When she was at the peak of her powers, even Mexico’s most powerful men were fascinated by Trevi, recalls Gregorio Luke, director of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. As a former cultural attache at the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C., Luke recalls smuggling the Trevi pinup calendars to the ambassador and various ministers, who winked their gratitude.

“In Mexico there’s a lot of sympathy for the underdog,” says Luke. “People connect with those who defy authority. That may be true everywhere, but in Mexico it’s particularly intense.”

Trevi says she captivated the country simply by holding up a mirror to it. “I’ve always been a reflection of reality,” she says. “People have even said that I’m psychic and can predict the future. But I can’t predict anything. It’s just that when you talk about reality, people suddenly see it all around them. The truth was always there, but nobody had ever put it for you in a song.”

Today it’s surprising to see how diverse Trevi’s fan base has become. It’s no longer just crazy kids who idolize her. It’s their parents and grandparents. It’s the Trevi wannabes themselves, now grown but still loyal, turning their own children into a new generation of fans. And they’re not just in Mexico but increasingly in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico, where she spent a week recently on promotion reconnecting with fans.

The mass adulation was evident the day before her TV performance, during a three-hour autograph session at a record store in a large San Juan shopping mall. So many people showed up that the line snaked outside and didn’t stop until the mall closed. They waited quietly to see her, displaying more reverence than frenzy.

“I never believed the things they said about her,” says elementary teacher Jose Cartagena, 27, who ran into his students in the line for autographs. “Now I see her even stronger, more independent, more self-assured, more just, ‘Here I am.’ ”

It’s the same way everywhere Trevi goes on the island. She is gently but constantly interrupted by fans during lunch at a typical mom-and-pop restaurant, although they don’t stop her from consuming a massive meal of soup, mofongos (a heavy Puerto Rican appetizer with pork skins), a main dish with rice and beans, carrot cake and a virgin pina colada.

Back home, however, some Mexicans are so overdosed on Trevi that even die-hard supporters have grown weary and jaded. Commentator Carlos Monsivais was among the first to break ranks, claiming that Trevi’s personal life had betrayed her feminist persona. Now his colleague Guadalupe Loaeza, who defended Trevi until the day she was released from prison, has joined the chorus of critics.

“Gloria Trevi has become like a caricature of herself,” says Loaeza. “It hurts me just to see her, with that look in her eyes of a mistreated puppy. She’s like all these fallen idols, a little like Elvis Presley or these aging rock stars who look old and wrinkled but still try to play the part. There’s a sort of disenchantment in her life. Poor little Gloria Trevi.”

Pity may be premature. The new album has sold more than 150,000 copies, mostly in the United States, and the opening day of her concert tour was hailed as a smash by both fans and the press in her hometown.

Lipsitz, the UC professor, says the new album is distinguished by a maturity and depth not commonly found at the top of U.S. pop charts.

Featuring eight new Trevi compositions, the album reveals a woman struggling with an irreconcilable contradiction: The impulse to assert her independence in an unjust, macho world and her desire to submit body and soul to love, even when she knows it’s bad for her.

“We don’t have a lot of narratives of grown women’s lives,” Lipsitz says. “It’s easy to stand on the sidelines and criticize, but who hasn’t had a relationship that was not totally consistent with their values and had to struggle through that? In some ways, this kind of difficulty might be that much more humanizing of her.”

Still salty after all these years

In the limousine after her shocking TV performance, Trevi is still animated, like a teenager who just pulled off a prank and got away with it. She wonders how much she exposed herself during her performance, then bends over in the leather seat to try to peek up her own skirt. Her body is so supple that she folds in half, putting her head between her knees. She sits up with a grin, then folds over to peek again.

Obviously the scandal hasn’t dulled her bawdy sense of humor, nor her salty language. Considering all the allegations and lingering doubts, wouldn’t it be wiser to tone down the naughty-girl bit in public?

“The truth is, since I didn’t do what they say I did, I don’t need to put on a mask, or watch my language, or make myself into something I’m not,” says the singer. “I think the ones who need to dissemble are the ones who have something to hide.”

Yet her experience has given her cause to show moderation, at least occasionally. That’s evident when she rolls down the car window to greet young fans waiting in the dark, narrow San Juan street behind the theater.

One adoring girl, thin, about 15, with punk jewelry in her nose, pulls her top up enough to proudly display a Gloria Trevi autograph on her belly -- Trevi signed it the day before during a promotional stop at a record store. Now, the girl breathlessly tells her idol, she plans to get the autograph permanently tattooed on her tummy.

“No, don’t do that, sweetheart,” Trevi says softly. “I’ll be back in May for my show and I promise I’ll sign it again when I see you.”

“I love you,” says the girl. “You’re beautiful.”

After the limo pulls away, Trevi reveals that the girl originally asked for the autograph on her rear end. Worried how that might look to the youngster’s parents, the singer persuaded her fan to accept the more modest alternative.

A lesson learned. Freedom, at least for Trevi, is not just another word for nothing left to lose.

Today she has a lot more to protect. She has to think of her son, now 3. The child gave her the will to live during her darkest days, she says, and now she has to give him a stable home and a future.

All her worries aren’t over. The press has recently focused on problems facing her loved ones. Trevi’s new boyfriend, Armando Gomez, is facing federal charges in Texas for allegedly smuggling $400,000 in cash out of the country; the lawyer and aspiring singer met Trevi when he visited her in jail asking her to write a song for him.

Today Trevi vows not to repeat her mistakes, in work or in love. She says she turned down an offer to appear nude for Playboy in Mexico. It’s not the right time for that, she says, because people will get distracted.

“I don’t support myself by my breasts,” she says. “I support myself by my singing, by my writing, my creativity. When I did my calendars, I was already well established in music. Now I want to start again with my album and my shows, and if I want to give fans a little something extra later on, we’ll see. Ha ha ha ha ha.”

Trevi lets out one of her frequent laughs, which sometimes escalate to a Phyllis Diller cackle. It sounds as if she wants to have the last laugh. Her next goal: to break into the U.S. market with an English album. But please don’t call her the Mexican Madonna.

“That’s just a way for people to say that you’re as famous as the most famous artist they know,” Trevi explains. “But I’m not going to be satisfied until there’s no need to call me the Madonna or the Xuxa of Mexico, as they used to say in Brazil.

“I want people to simply say, ‘That’s Gloria Trevi.’ Because that means they’ll know me for who I am.”

*

On the Web

To hear samples from Gloria Trevi’s “Como Nace El Universo,” visit calendarlive.com/trevi.

Contact Agustin Gurza at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.