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Jennifer Lopez has made it very clear that no matter what fame and fortune she amasses or her stunning transformation into a bombshell A-lister, she’ll always be Jenny from the Block in her heart — specifically, a block in the Bronx borough of New York City where she grew up with two sisters and her parents in a small two-story house. For Lopez, growing up without a lot of money in a tough, independent chunk of the Big Apple is a core component of who she is as a person.
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To paraphrase one of her biggest hits, she used to have a little, now she has a lot. Her old family home is certainly a far cry from the $60.8 million 46,000 square-foot house — featuring 12 bedrooms and 24 bathrooms — that she bought and subsequently sold amid her short-lived marriage to Ben Affleck. Regardless of her fame, her hit films, her music tours, and her awards, Lopez will always feel a connection to her childhood in New York.
It wasn’t always pretty, and it wasn’t always easy. Lopez has gotten candid about her youth in numerous interviews and films — including her 2024 biographical documentary “The Greatest Love Story Never Told.” As Lopez said at WSJ. Magazine’s 2020 Innovator Awards, “Growing up in the Bronx really did shape me.”
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She had a complicated relationship with her parents
While Jennifer Lopez does have a close relationship with her mother, Guadalupe Rodriguez, the singer and actress has been candid about their occasionally strained relationship and how she felt somewhat unloved as a kid. In “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” Lopez recalled how being the middle child — between older sister Leslie and younger sister Lynda — made her somewhat starved for attention and appreciation. Additionally, Lopez said her parents, who divorced in the ’90s, were too busy or preoccupied with their own lives to give that sort of attention.
“I felt very ignored by my dad because he was always working nights, then all day he would sleep. I didn’t feel like I had enough of a connection with him,” she shared in the film. Lopez added that her mom was the “narcissistic, center of the attention, life-of-the-party-type person.” Lopez also claimed in the 2022 documentary “Halftime” that her mom raised her to be self-reliant but that she could also be violent with her family at times. All that being said, she now seems to have an amicable relationship with both of her parents.
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She had a religious upbringing and attended a Catholic high school
While growing up in the Bronx, Jennifer Lopez was raised Roman Catholic by her parents and was enrolled in Preston High School, a small all-girls Catholic school, and often attended mass with her mom and her sisters. As Lopez told MovieWeb in October 2004, “I went to Catholic school for 12 years and went to church every Sunday. I may not do that anymore, but I think it gave me a good basis … I’ve also explored things on my own, different philosophies and spiritual teachings, and I use what works for me.”
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Her religious upbringing and faith have guided her throughout her life since childhood as well, including when it came to having a family. Before she welcomed her twins, Emme and Max, with her ex-husband Marc Anthony, Lopez said she felt God would bless her with a family in the future. She also expressed that, due to her faith and upbringing, she never would consider in vitro fertilization as an option for having kids.
“When it comes to family and relationships, I’m quite traditional, just because of the way I was raised,” she told Elle in January 2010 (via Us Weekly). “I also believe in God, and I have a lot of faith in that, so I just felt like you don’t mess with things like that.”
She participated in a ton of extracurricular activities that led her to performing
Even from a young age, Jennifer Lopez was an energetic, ambitious dreamer who took on a lot of challenges and projects in order to express herself and strive for greatness. This included a whole lot of different extracurricular activities focused on both athletics and creative performances. According to the 2006 biography “Jennifer Lopez: Actor and Singer,” she was involved in gymnastics, she played in the school’s softball league, and she competed in track. As Lopez explained, she was a bit of a tomboy and wanted to show off her athletic side.
However, she also had a burgeoning love for acting and dancing that her mother, Guadalupe Rodriguez, nurtured and cultivated. Lopez and her sisters learned how to dance by taking lessons at the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club, where the future A-lister also took part in musicals. “I always wanted to sing and dance and be in movies,” Lopez told biographer James Robert Parish. “Ever since I was three, that’s how I was — I always felt all this drama inside me.”
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She enjoyed eating at particular neighborhood bodegas
Jennifer Lopez has reiterated many times that she came from humble beginnings and didn’t have much money to throw around as a kid. Like many kids who had to take care of themselves, Lopez would walk home from school and grab an occasional bite at a local bodega, buying whatever she could afford with the lunch money she had on hand. As Lopez explained during her “73 Questions” interview with Vogue in 2022 when asked about her go-to order when she lived in the Bronx, “A ham and cheese on a roll, with an orange drink — if you know, you know — and a small bag of chips.”
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This winking nod to a special “orange drink” went viral two years later, as many fans tried to figure out exactly what she was talking about. Lopez revealed to Harper’s Bazaar in May 2024, “It’s just a plain orange drink… It came in a little plastic container with a little bit of aluminum foil over it. And it wasn’t called anything except orange drink or grape drink or whatever… it was worth 25 cents, and I got it with a bag of potato chips, and that was like my after-school treat for myself.” With the additional details provided, many fans concluded that the drink was, in all likelihood, a Little Hug fruit-flavored drink — tiny beverages that come in plastic bottles shaped like barrels and sealed with a foil lid. At least that viral mystery from Lopez’s childhood has (probably) been solved!
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She moved out of her home when she was 18 to pursue her dreams
While Jennifer Lopez’s mother supported her desire to perform and entertain, she also wanted her daughter to go to college and get an education. For Lopez, however, the only future she could imagine for herself was as an entertainer, and this caused tension between herself and her mom. “I didn’t want to go to college — I wanted to try dance full-time. So she and I had a break,” Lopez told W Magazine in July 2013. “I started sleeping on the sofa in the dance studio. I was homeless, but I told her, ‘This is what I have to do.'”
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A few months after leaving home at 18 and barely scraping by, Lopez got the opportunity to work as a dancer in Europe for a few months, which cemented her desire to pursue her dreams. When she got back to New York, she quickly booked her first big gig as one of the famous Fly Girls on the hit sketch series “In Living Color.” This set her path to stardom, but she never forgot where she came from.
As Lopez said in her acceptance speech at WSJ. Magazine’s 2020 Innovator Awards, “Everything about me, my kind of grit — I’ve never thought about it or described it this way before — but it is the heartbeat inside of me, that is the Bronx and my upbringing, that continues to drive me.”
