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“Bronx attitude” is Really a Frame of Mind
Bronx Attitude is a warm, proud, deeply human memoir about identity, journalism, and carrying your neighborhood with you wherever you go. What does “Bronx attitude” really mean to you?
“Bronx attitude” is really a frame of mind, an nergy that propels you into roles and spaces that feel foreign. The attitude projects confidence and bravery even when you’re nervous. It is like a shield and a balm at the same time.
You describe culture shock in college. How did navigating spaces that were not built for you shape the professional you became?
Navigating those spaces prepared me to help others get through those spaces as well. Every time I exerienced difficulty i wanted to tell others about it. It shaped the way I operate as a professional as I am always trying to help people access help and power.
Your career mirrored the unprecedented growth of Latino New York. How conscious were you, in the moment, of being a chronicler of that history while living inside it?
I knew that part of our work, as journalists, was to document the history of this community, but I am not certain I was always conscious of it since we were in the midst of many battles. Immigration, civil rights, access to housing. However, we did put a lot of effort into covering the successes and in that way we were aware that our folks were making history – on broadway, in entertainment, sports, education and other realms.
You’re honest that success is not clean or solitary. What do you hope young Latinas reading this book take from the parts that are most difficult, not the victories?
I hope that young Latinas reading the book will understand that they are not alone or first in their struggles. That we all share challenges whether cultural, or adolescence, or emotional and family dramas. We have had these struggles and we have overcome them.
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The author describes her challenges and victories as a young reporter covering city hall during the Koch administration to the role of publisher and CEO. Her career mirrored and coincided with the unprecedented growth in New York’s diverse Latino community. From her Bronx childhood to a seat at the table in New York’s iconic boardrooms, the author demonstrates how Latinas lead.
This memoir is a celebration of family, traditions, heritage, and good old hardcore New York City hustle.
“Written with stunning honesty, breathtaking beauty, and New York humor, Bronx Attitude is a book that’s impossible to put down. When you finish reading this mighty memoir, you’ll want to clap for the author, Rossana Rosado, who rose from the protective bosom of a hard-working community of Puerto Rican entrepreneurs and pioneers to become one of the most beloved and powerful women in publishing and government. It is a raw and fearless exploration of how identity is shaped within the quiet, complicated bonds of family, an intimate peek into the life of an ambitious woman who leans on the power of her culture and profound love of the written word to chart a path to live her dreams in an unforgiving city and media industry.
Bronx Attitude will touch readers’ hearts, spark conversations, and linger long after the final page.”
—Sandra Guzmán
Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women
Bronx Attitude
Bronx Attitude is Rossana Rosado’s memoir of becoming herself: a Bronx-born Puerto Rican girl raised among stairwells, bodegas, bilingual family music, formidable women, stern patriarchs, and the warm chaos of Wheeler Avenue, who grows into a journalist, publisher, public servant, and keeper of communal memory. The book moves from childhood scenes, like her grandmother teaching her to read El Diario in Spanish, to the electric public history of Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination, to Rosado’s years at El Diario, where journalism becomes both vocation and inheritance. It’s really a story about “we”: family, Latinos, women, neighborhoods, ancestors, and the complicated blessing of belonging.
The early chapters have a gorgeous lived-in texture: the garbage cans clanging on the curb, WADO playing through a neighbor’s window, Papá bringing coffee to Mamá, the child sneaking upstairs for toast and discovering that the newspaper isn’t broken, it’s in Spanish. Those moments feel tender. I also loved how she writes women into the center of the world, not as saints exactly, but as forces. Mamá with her private money, Lucía dancing with children in the rain, Rosa calling everything “divine” despite the quiet cruelties around her. Rosado’s sentences can be plainspoken, almost conversational, and then suddenly they gleam. The memoir has that Bronx rhythm: affectionate, blunt, funny, wounded, proud.
The book insists that personal history and public history are braided together. Rosado doesn’t treat Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination as a distant news event. She makes it feel like a family room, a newsroom, a collective exhale, with champagne glasses, red nail polish, and the startling realization that one woman’s ascent could lift a whole community’s posture. The chapters on El Diario carry a different ache. When she writes about Manuel de Dios’s murder, or about inheriting leadership after Carlos Ramirez’s death, the memoir becomes more than remembrance. It becomes an argument for ethnic media, for courage, for telling the stories mainstream institutions overlook. I didn’t always feel the book was equally tight from chapter to chapter, but even that looseness has a kind of honesty. It reads like someone making room at the table for everyone who shaped her.
I felt like Bronx Attitude had earned its title: not attitude as swagger alone, but as stance, memory, defiance, and love. Rosado’s final reflections on leaving El Diario and looking back at her younger self gave the book a soft, satisfying ache, especially because the memoir never pretends success is clean or solitary. It’s carried by the dead, the elders, the cousins, the mentors, the city, the language, the food, the paper, the block. I’d recommend this to readers who like reflective memoirs about identity, journalism, Latina leadership, New York City, and the emotional architecture of family. It’s a good book for anyone who knows that where you come from doesn’t just explain you, it keeps speaking through you.
Pages: 264 | ASIN : B0GS98TMGQ
