Emme Muñiz

Jennifer Lynn Lopez was born on July 24, 1969, in the Bronx, a borough of New York City, and raised in its Castle Hill neighborhood. Her parents, Guadalupe Rodríguez and David Lopez, were born in Puerto Rico and met in New York City. After serving in the Army, David worked as a computer technician at Guardian Insurance Company. Guadalupe was a homemaker for the first ten years of Lopez's life and later worked as a Tupperware salesperson and a kindergarten and gym teacher. They divorced in the 1990s after 33 years of marriage.

Lopez is a middle child; she has an older sister, Leslie, and a younger sister, Lynda. The three shared a bedroom. Lopez has described her upbringing as "strict". She was raised in a Roman Catholic family; she attended Mass every Sunday and received a Catholic education, attending Holy Family School and the all-girls Preston High School, a private school. In school, Lopez ran track on a national level, participated in gymnastics and was on the softball team. She danced in school musicals and played a lead role in a production of Godspell. She described herself as a "tomboy" and "very athletic".

There was "lots of music" in the typically Puerto Rican household, and Lopez and her sisters were encouraged to sing, dance, and create their own plays for family events. West Side Story made a particular impression on the young Lopez, who wanted to be an entertainer from an early age. As a teenager, she learned flamenco, jazz, and ballet at the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club and taught dance to younger students, including Kerry Washington. After graduating from high school, she had a part-time secretarial job at a law firm and studied business at New York's Baruch College for one semester. At age 18, she enrolled as a full-time student at Manhattan's Phil Black Dance Studio, where she had already taken night classes in jazz and tap dance. Her parents were unhappy with her decision to leave college to pursue a dance career. According to Lopez, her parents felt it was "foolish" because "no Latinas did that". Her mother asked her to move out of the family home and they stopped speaking for eight months. Lopez moved to Manhattan, sleeping in the dance studio's office for the first few months.