[2] Rivera went both to elementary and junior high school at Colegio San Miguel in Utuado, and he also participated at the local Catholic cathedral as an altar boy, before he and his family moved, as a teen, to the Puerto Rican city of Manatí.
He also acted in radionovelas-soap operas broadcast live on radio stations-and, to supplement his income, he also got a job at the circulations department of the famous Puerto Rican newspaper, El Mundo, and another one, at the Tres Monjitas milk company, where he was a wholesale sales agent for a time.
La Fiera was a major hit in Mexico, Peru and Brazil, giving Rivera international exposure in those countries.
In the Dominican Republic, Rivera acted in a telenovela named "Llanto en mi Ciudad" ("A Cry in my City").
[2] Rivera got an offer to either establish himself permanently in Mexico or work as an actor in the South American country of Peru; he preferred to return to his home-country of Puerto Rico to be near his by-now growing family.
In 1988, Rivera recorded a television commercial for a restaurant located in Plaza Rio Hondo, Bayamón, Puerto Rico, named "La Cazuela".
[5] Ever since, he has been semi-retired from acting, due in part to Puerto Rican television networks down-scaling the number of telenovelas produced in the Caribbean island beginning in the late 1980s.
Rivera later became a politician for the statehood-claiming New Progressive Party, but he has since retired from that as well and taken a basic non-political standing every time he is asked about politics on interviews ever since.