Rossana Rosado's Bronx Attitude

I don't know. WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. People in New York Journalism circles know my next guest as the Emmy Award winning and Peabody Award winning, former editor and publisher of El Diario La Prenza, the city's oldest Spanish language newspaper. She was also a WNYC intern on her way into the field. People in government and criminal justice circles know her these days as Governor Kathy Hochul's commissioner of the Division of Criminal Justice Services. And maybe you just know her if you're from the Bronx. Rosanna Rosado has a new memoir out now called Bronx Attitude. You know, I used to call you Rosanna as a journalism colleague. Now I guess I should call you Commissioner. Welcome back to WNYC. Thank you, Brian. So good to be back. I actually was surprised to see in the book on page 101. I didn't know it was coming, that you were a WNYC intern. That was before I was here. So what kind of internship did you have and what did you get out of it? Something good, I hope, at the time. Oh, it was actually wonderful. It's when the city actually owned the station. We were in the municipal building. I don't know if you still are. No. The offices were on one floor and then the studio was all the way in the tower. So I was a... It was an unpaid job, but they paid me in two roles of tokens a week because I lived in a double fair zone in the Bronx where I had to take a bus to the train. And I had associate producer credit on a show called Amanesed. It was English language, but about the Latino community, it had like an art section, and then we always interviewed someone. We interviewed, like Raulia at the time was in the Play 9 on Broadway. And so as this inter, and I got to write the script, serve the coffee, go upstairs to the tower, you know, escort guests onto the show. It was a TV show. So I got a lot out of it. It was the early days. I want to say it was 1983. And it was kind of the 1980 census had predicted that the 80s would be the decade of the Hispanic. And so it was kind of in those early days. I think we were late in the... I think the 90s became more of the decade. But I got great experience. I was there for six months. We did 13 shows. And then I went to work for ABC All News 88 radio. And all you got paid in was subway tokens. What's a subway token? I'm kidding. The WNYC story you told in the book was about your interview as an intern here with the actor, Raoul Julia, who just mentioned. that came up later when you were at, I think it was CBS, in the context of Puerto Rican actors playing Italian characters and Italian actors playing Puerto Ricans. Would you like to tell that story? Sure. It was the guy who did reviews. I think he might, well, the station closed last year, but he was still there to the end. He said to me, I told him I had seen the play nine. And you know, Rao Julia was a hero in our Puerto Rican community.

And he said, I don't like, you know, the fact that there was a Puerto Rican playing in Italian. And I was young and a little intimidated by Lions. That was his name. And I said, Well, you know, Italians have been playing Puerto Ricans for years and to see, you know, West Side stories. So it was interesting, you know, being a young, you know, kind of Latina reporter in a newsroom like ABC, where there were people from all over, but also very New York, right? It was a station very ingrained in New York lore. Was that talking back as a young journalist, young Latina journalist, to this established radio theater critic, was that an example of your Bronx attitude? Yes. And some people say, you know, it was a tough time too. You know, I was a little intimidated, but when someone says something you totally disagree with and you're from the Bronx, you know, you just let them have it. And I think, you know, it's not just Bronx. I'm from the Bronx, but I think there's an outer borough thing, you know, when you come into Manhattan, you know, you're making your living. And, um. And people push you in certain ways. Like your borough personality comes out and you say, you know, it took me a while to get here. I had the longest train ride. So I want to let you know that I have a right to be here too. There you go. I was born in the Bronx and raised in Queen, so I've got it twice. Why did you call the book Bronx Attitude? Because I think early in my career, the attitude was a little intimidating. You know, when you tell people you're from the Bronx, they make a whole profile in their head about who you are, you know, the toughness, the streets, you know, whatever they saw in media. And I was actually, you know, I was in a very, I grew up in a very sheltered family, surrounded by family. You know, I talk about in the book how my grandfather bought these houses. And we grew up in the driveway, protected by all the adults around us. But, you know, sometime in my career, I say, you know what, if people, when you say you're from the Bronx, I felt like if people think that you can, you know, beat them up and it's not such a bad thing. And you're right about not just people thinking you could beat them up. I didn't see that part if you wrote that. But you're right about growing up in a basement apartment in the Bronx. Where in the Bronx was that? And how would you begin to describe your childhood there? It was Wheeler Avenue, 1318 Wheeler Avenue between Bronx River and 172nd Street. So right, you know, kind of before the bridge that takes you to the South, South Bronx.

And I went to PS77, which was across the street from Monroe High School at the time. And there are these brick houses that have three apartments, including the basement apartment. So we had the basement apartment. My uncle was upstairs, and then on the top floor was my grandmother and grandfather. So it was our Puerto Rican family compound where my grandfather bought these two houses. He had bodegas also. So the men worked in the bodegas. And there were 13 cousins. You know, we grew up together in this dry house. They literally locked the driveway. And that was our world. We were allowed to roam anywhere within the houses and the driveway. The driver was big enough that you could ride your bicycle up and down. You know, in that way we were sheltered, you know, and we grew up in the Bronx, but, you know, there were always eyes on us. It was a family. And, you know, with 13 cousins, Brian, you never had to invite friends to a birthday party. You always had enough, you know, to fill an event. And so I wanted to write about my experience because I think. I also wanted to honor my grandfather who came from Puerto Rico, washed dishes in one of those university clubs until he had enough money to both fly his family here. My mother came when she was 12 and then, you know, provide, he said, look, in this town, you need. a place to live and a place to work. So, you know, with the bodegas, he had a place for the men to work and with the houses he had shelter. And he, you know, he felt it was his responsibility to keep us all safe. My mother grew up in that area. She went to Monroe High School. She was telling me just the other day about learning to ride a bicycle on the streets of the Bronx. And in her case, too, there are many cousins right in the immediate blocks. including on the very block in which she grew up. The press release for the... I'm sorry, those are blocks with wide sidewalks and wide streets, so you could ride a bike and not get hit by a car. Ah, the press release for the book refers to your young self listening to the world through that basement window. I thought maybe as a radio person that listening was an interesting choice of word there rather than watching or in addition to watching. Could you describe a little of the listening part? Sure, because the windows are kind of, they were at the top of the wall. So you got to see people's feet. You know, you couldn't actually see out, like from my grandmother's window upstairs, you had a view of, you know, of even the street beyond Bronx River. But from the basement, you learned to listen to the sounds. So you knew. by the sounds of the dogs, even by the footsteps, by the garbage cans, by the garbage truck. You just knew what kind of what time of day it was. You could hear Mr. Softie. It's a one, we grew up as a one-way street, so there was more control than on a two-way street. And as a child, interested in everything, I learned to identify the sounds and to time, kind of, you know, to time my egress from the building so that I would either miss my grandfather or miss my father.

um and you know and get my way you know i i i talk about when i was only five but i was like i want to get upstairs because my grandmother had a better breakfast than what my mother were prepared downstairs and so you know you you could go from apartment to apartment and you know get the meal that you wanted So listeners, any questions about Rosanna Rosado's life, mostly in journalism, which is mostly what we're going to get back to, journalism at El Diario or elsewhere, or her work now is the New York State Commissioner of the Division of Criminal Justice Services, 212-433, WNYC, or maybe you've known her along the way, 212-433-9692. You open the book with a page of... Who am I, one-liners? A few of them for our listeners' benefit. I am a bowl of rice and beans. I'm a mix of cultures, flavors, and sounds. I'm a voracious reader and a book snob. My life has an eclectic soundtrack. I love music. I hate noise. I despise in sincerity. I am the White House and Sing Sing. And I am Lincoln Center in a long black skirt. Sounds Rosetta like you've had to do or wanted to do. A lot of code switching in your life. Would you put it that way? Yes, absolutely. You have to, you know, code switch. I think that's part of us as New Yorkers, too. You know, we kind of match and pace to who's in the room. But also, that refers to also being from the Bronx, from being from the outer boroughs and sometimes trying to fit in and then sometimes just saying, you know, I'm here, you know, deal with it. But because of the job, you know, because I... I kind of grew up at a diario, you know, in journalism. When I became publisher, I was thrust into this world of the, you know, the power breakfast rooms and the beautiful spaces in New York where you get to hobnob with people who are not from the Bronx. And so you're code switching all the time almost to the extent where you can lose track of who you are. Because journalism in this country is by and large, blue collar, right? Or used to be, I want to say. Used to be. The way, you know, right, what it was for me, you know, for my career, you know, in the days of Jimmy Breslin and, you know, folks who were kind of, you know, really hitting the street, you know, interviewing people, not doing just, you know, internet searches, right? And so I came from that and I love that. But that made it harder when I was a publisher to be in this, you know, in kind of some of these rooms that, you know, I had never been in before. I remember going to a room, to a boardroom of a banker when I was working with a partnership for New York City and they thrust me into these spaces that I. You know, I had only seen in movies, and I'm like, what am I doing here? So I would always think, especially in those breakfast rooms, you know, those power breakfast rooms where you go early to be seen, I would always think of my grandfather and his brothers, you know, washing dishes in those clubs. And I said, well, they did that so I could be here. So I have to make this count. But sometimes, you know, it is intimidating. You know, the New York power structure is intimidating.

The book is called Bronx Attitude. Rosanna Rosado is the author. And writing about your early days at El Diario, you confess that you, though, a daughter of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, had to learn to do journalism in Spanish because your main language was really English. Did you grow up bilingual to any degree? Yes, we grew up bilingual. I spoke Spanish at home. But, you know, when I went to Eliario, I realized the Spanish I learned at home was a conversational Spanish, and the Spanish I needed to write journalism was different, right, than the... the way I had learned to write in journalism school. And also, by the way, journalism school doesn't prepare you for the streets of New York. I remember when I told the story in the book when I went to cover my first fire, and there's no course on covering a fire in New York City in journalism school. So the photographer who was with me, who was an old, you know, older guy, he said, listen. Talk to the guy with the big hat when he's not busy. That's the fire marshal and he'll give you all the information. And so it's funny how you learn on the street, you know, in intense circumstances. Because if you talk to the fire marshal before he's ready to talk to you, he's not going to give you the information. You know, there's an apocryphal story that I've heard by journalism professors that they tell to New York journalism students that probably never happened, but it's the story of a journalism student who is assigned to cover something at City Hall. But they came back and said, well, there was a fire at City Hall, so there was no story, so I came back.

Well, that reminds me of my first story. They sent me to the Bronx to cover the story of a woman who was walking barefoot because she had made a promise to all the gods so that to get her son out of addiction. But while I was, this is my very first assignment on Aldous Street in the Bronx. But while I was there, there was a raid of the numbers guy. the bolitero, and the same mothers who were protesting the drug stuff were incensed that they had arrested the numbers guy because, you know, they didn't make the connection between all of that, you know, that economy, right? They were just like, this is the guy who can let us hit the number and, you know, and get rich. So that became my first story for El Diario. How about that? So you wrote that you were fascinated. at LDREO by how all these nationalities came together in one workspace, but also that there was so much conflict in that newsroom, battles between factions that were political, generational, journalistic, and patriotic. You use all those words. Let's take one. What do you mean by patriotic in that context? Well, as an American, right, I'm an American born and raised. I'm a Puerto Rican born and raised in the Bronx, and I go into a newsroom where patriots is, you know, also, which is a term I associated with being American, but it also applies to people from all over the world and it's all over these Latin American countries. And in Latin America, it was a little surprise to me because we don't learn this in high school, even college here, unless we go out of our way to study the history of all these countries. I mean, this is what makes me so happy that this year we had the World Cup here in the country and that people can learn more about the world. But as a young, you know, even reporter, a journalism student college grad, I was surprised that Peru and Ecuador had their own anthems, their own military, their own history, right? When we talk about patriotic, it expanded the definition for me. And I learned so much about the countries and the relationship with the United States. Uncovering. By the way, here's a text that just came in from somebody you probably know or knew. They didn't give a name, but says, Rosanna Rosado is a New York icon and institution. She's around the way girl and the ultimate intellectual. She's also a gracious and generous colleague and mentor, always acknowledging those who came before her while availing herself to up-and-comers, especially when she saw talent and potential in fellow Latinos much love. writes that listener, whoever they are. Story on covering Mayor Koch for an L. Diario readership. You write that toward the end of a second term, so this I guess would have been around 1983, 84, 85, you write, quote, Koch woke up to the fact that black New Yorkers were really pissed off at him, so he decided to court Hispanics, unquote. How did that play out for you as an LDRO reporter?

Well, he formed like a Hispanic, a commission on Hispanic concerns, and he started to pay attention. I remember he went out to dinner, he took us out to dinner, my editor and I, and we were trying to get into room nine, because we had one of the, you know, in room nine is the press room in city hall, and we were in the basement, kind of with other. papers and you know they had they had a whole basement set up for the kind of the leftovers and so my editor said we would love to be in room nine and ed kodge said yeah i don't control that and um and we said yeah well we don't control how people vote so so i was the first el diana reporter in room nine And that was, I think, 85 or 86. And, you know, Ed Koch, he was, you know, he was the original, you know, media person, you know, a politician who loved the media. He did three and four press conferences a day. There was one by the radio. He would open up his office. I have a picture. I'm sitting at his desk because you just get in the office and you sit wherever you can. And, you know, all of that is different now. You can't even get into City Hall. You can't even get to the steps without going through, you know, the police station now. But in those days, it was all open. You could sit at the top of the stairs, eat your tuna fish sandwich for lunch and observe, you know, New York happening. So being there during the Koch administration was special. It was exciting. It was never boring. And it was crazy because that was when his administration also started to unravel a bit. So I was there when Donald Manus, who was the borough president of Queens at one time, committed suicide. And then that was the beginning of all the scandals surrounding the Koch administration. And Koch did win re-election. that year 85, with overwhelming Latino support, you remind us in the book. You know what I'm curious about Rosanna? Was there any kind of parallel between Koch winning Latinos then, while so much of black New York had come to consider him a racist? And Donald Trump doing as well as he has with Latino voters, despite the overwhelming black vote against him in each of his races. I mean, right, they're completely different eras, but I think there is something to that. I think that in the, you know, in kind of the political binary between, you know, black and white, that Latinos have always been either up for grabs, either ignored or courted and sometimes courted only because, you know, everything else is not working out. And we had, you know, Latino. In the political structure in New York City, Latinos have always been incredibly supportive of the black leadership. But I think it's felt by many people in the Latino community that wasn't always reciprocated in those days. And so Koch hit on that note and said, I'm going to court these. And he hired Luis Miranda as his advisor of Hispanic affairs and had this commission on Hispanic affairs that would deal with issues. Maybe better known now as Lynn Manuel's father.

As Linnella's father, yes. So we all have part of that history. And in the end, I believe the Latino community benefited from some of that kind of laser-focused attention. But I want to say also it didn't affect our relationship with the black leadership because we were always, you know, looking to build coalitions and we came from the same neighborhoods. We had a lot of affinity. Erica in East Harlem. You're on WNYC with Rosanna Rosado. Hi, Erica. Good morning to you both, and congratulations on your book, Rosanna. I think that one of the things that's often missed in the New York City narrative is how El Diario has been such a rebel daily against what's considered like the white dailies. And, you know, I think about one of many moments like when Bloomberg engineered his... third term, and Diario called that out and other papers kind of just folded in line. But I was hoping you could kind of speak a little bit more to what you talk about in the book about how under your leadership, you and Diario were a player in the Sotomayor nomination. And chapter one of the book, I will point out, Erica, and everybody, chapter one of the book, though it's about Rosanna's life, it's called Sonia Sotomayor. And Rosanna, we have about two minutes left. So give Erica one minute answer, and then I have one final question about your current job. Okay. So, you know, the 2009 was a special year. We had honored her that spring. We were in behind the scenes, you know, we were playing a strategic role in making sure that people knew her record. It was, we knew there would be an opportunity for Latino justice and we wanted it to be. a New Yorker and we wanted it to be a Puerto Rican and we wanted it to be Sonia. But we had to do a lot of work behind the scenes. And so Eliair was key in making sure that we covered her history. We worked with at the time, Nydia Velazquez, Congresswoman and Chuck Schumer to make sure that there weren't a slate of names, that there was one name. And so I think it was, It was that moment in journalism where you're not just telling the story, but you're endorsing the story. And that's always a delicate place. But it was like, we cannot be objective in this moment where we're about to make history. And so I tell that. And as a publisher and an opinion columnist, you were allowed to have an opinion there, right? Correct. Right. While staying out of the newsroom's way. Last question. Now you are the commissioner of the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. This could start a whole other, you know, separate interview with you. Yes, I would love to come back and talk about the work we're doing that. So please do. Let's make a point of doing that. But what's at the heart of the work you do? People hear criminal justice, but you don't run the state police, right? No.

That's a separate agency, but thanks to the amount of money investment that Governor Kathy Hochul has made, we've been able to turn around from 2021, where we had a high incidence of shootings in many communities in New York State. We're out now at historic lows in crime rates that always gets lost in the, you know, when there's political campaigns going on. But it was investing money. The governor has historic investments in not just fighting crime and law enforcement tech. giving them what they needed, but also funding the community's ability to be at the table with those law enforcement people making those decisions in the communities that have the highest shootings, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, etc. We've been able to see those numbers come down during her tenure, which is going on five years. All right, more to come on that. Another day. The book is called... The book is called Bronx Attitude. It's a memoir by Rosanna Rosetta. By the way, here's a text from a listener. We'll end on Bronx Born and Raised. Hear how you speak about journalism, and it's how I begin to feel about New York entirely. This city has become a clout cloud of its own making. I've made an active choice to stop code switching and watch people's perspective of me dissolve when that Bronx hops out. Do you want to say one last thing you were trying to get in there? No, I just want to say that Bronx Attitude.com is my website, and you can get the book through the website. And I want to say that the main reason I wrote this book is I want people to tell their stories. I want them to know we were here. And I want to honor the people who brought us here, you know, the original immigrants who came from all of our countries. I think it's important that people know that we're part of New York history. Thanks, Rosanna. Commissioner, good to have you.