This is an interview with Jose Rosario, a bad ass activist, mental health therapist, super smart and fun guy who has somehow never watched Star Trek. It is a part of the Cool Cats: Voices from the Disability Community series, in which Meriah interviews cool people from the disability community so you can get to know them. Jose's "Short" Bio Born to young Puerto Rican parents, José Rosario developed Cerebral Palsy as a premature baby. His family's journey towards equity deeply impacted his mental health. Currently nearing his PhD in Clinical Psychology, his research focuses on cultural trauma in intersectional communities. He is an Interdisciplinary Minority Fellow for the American Psychological Association, member of the Congressional Diversity and Equality Advisory Board for Congressman James Langevin, and member of the Rhode Island Attorney General Community Advisory Board. He has been honored with the Chris Martin Humanitarian Award and the Victoria Lederberg Award for Excellence in Psychology. José is a keynote speaker and workshop facilitator helping business, nonprofits, and educational institutions to understand and implement identity-inclusive mental health protocols and culturally aware community healing. https://youtu.be/_ZgoUvAopKg An Interview with Jose Rosario, Cool Cat Meriah: [00:00:00] Okay. Welcome Jose. Thank you so much for joining me here on Unpacking Disability and, the Cool Cat Voices from the Disability Community Series where we try to. bring disability community together and introduce cool people from the cross-disability community of which you are definitely one. And thank you so much for being here. Jose: Thank you for having me. I'm so glad that we have a space to also show people with disabilities is not one note characters. We are complex. Meriah: Oh, absolutely. I'm wondering if you can take a minute to introduce yourself. Jose: Sure. Who am I? That's a great question. I am a speaker. I'm an activist. I'm also a therapist. I'm mental health therapist, and I'm a researcher. All of my work is about intersectional violence and how intersectional communities, queer bipoc folks, [00:01:00] queer, disabled folks react to violence and engage in healing. And so, I'm often thinking. About how folks are experiencing harm from various directions. And we don't just cower in fear. There are ways in which we pick ourselves up as a community and move forward. And so, wanting to bring that to light and support and affirm that as much as I can. Meriah: Wow. Thank you. There's so much I want to talk to you about. Yeah. So much. One of the things about the Cool Cat series is as I started this a long time ago,and I ask the same set of questions to everybody. And the point of that is really to emphasize the difference in our answers and how we are so very different. Like we're all coming to this with a lived experience and disability and we're so diverse. I think that's part of the beauty of everyone answering the same set of questions. Diving into those questions, [00:02:00] I am wondering what is your connection with disability? Jose: Oh, such an intimate connection, right? I have been disabled my entire life, and I recognize that disability is the one identity where it can happen anytime in your lifespan. So, all I know is my experience as a disabled person. I was born premature. A couple of months into birth, I stopped breathing and, acquired some brain damage, which led to my CP diagnosis. And so being in a wheelchair using canes like this has been a huge part of me. And I think for a long time there was this. Tension, right? The sort of like, why me aspect to this? Why am I different? What did I do? Why did I have to be this way? And I have very fortunately swung on the other side of the pendulum and been like, you know what? The way that I have to access the world, the way that I have to go into a space and be like, how do I arrange myself here? How do I navigate? This has been a skill that has taught me a [00:03:00] lot. It's taught me to think on my toes to be flexible. And I have really found meaning in that. And as I get older and as I delve deeper into my own career, I'm finding myself really looking, and we were talking about this before this about ancestral wisdom, right? And I come from some pretty cool disability activists, right? Like those people are the people that we come from as a disability community. And so really finding strength and love and affirmation and people like Judy Heumann, for example, is a big hero of mine. So that's my sort of quick spiel on how I feel about disability. And I love the word disability too. It's a historical term, right? It is a civil rights term. I want to reclaim that word. Meriah: I feel very strongly about that too. Amen. Jose: Yeah. Meriah: Quick question, Star Trek or Star Wars. Jose: I have to be honest, I am, I'm not familiar with either, but I love Baby Yoda, so for my partner, I'm going to say Star Wars. Meriah: Yoda is pretty cool, yeah. Can [00:04:00] never fault Yoda. Jose: that's all I got. So, we got to go with what we have. Meriah: Okay. If you could live in any other country for two years, where would you go? Jose: Oh, my goodness. I would say Puerto Rico, but obviously that's a complicated. Answer, because of the colony status. But I think if I had to think outside of that, I've actually heard that London is pretty accessible. Given that we don't have the A DA in another country, that it can be pretty accessible. Meriah: Wow. Jose: That's cool. Meriah: And what dish would you bring to our community picnic potluck. Jose: Oh, you picked the right question for the right person. I am a foodie. I love cooking. I think food allows me to connect back to my family. I think I'd have to bring some kind of Puerto Rican dessert, specifically coconut rice pudding. I know it sounds odd. No, I love it. I love it. Yeah, I could eat it every day. There's something about the spices and the coconut. It just brings me right back home. [00:05:00] Yeah, you're with me. Yeah. Meriah: So, I'm wondering if we could move in now to, and this is probably going to be a really big question for you because you've done so much. But how did you come to doing what you do? Like how has your career trajectory flowed? Jose: Yeah. I always say that I thought my career was going to be something very different. I trained as like an addiction scientist, so I was very traditionally, psychology focused, right? Looking at things like interventions and randomized control trials, and I thought that was where I was going to be. Like, I really thought I was going to be that guy that just did trials all the time. My life changed. Overnight, really, in 2017, somebody asked me to come to a talk, and I thought, oh yeah, I'm so ready. I'm going to bring my data and I'm going to make charts that match the colors of the conference and it's going to be so great for my nerdy brain. And they were like; we don't want that. We want you. And in sharing my own experience of being a mental health professional, of being different. [00:06:00] That was the theme of the talk. I realized that I'm not happy with science that is decontextualized. Like I want to think about how people's lived experiences impact mental health and psychological wellbeing. And from that talk finding people saying I wish my brother could hear this. I wish my neighbor could have heard your talk. It made me realize I'm not alone. There are so many people who have lived experiences that impact our mental health and that led me to the Phoenix Empowered the idea that like, we have to rise up, but we actually have to be empowered to rise up. Otherwise, it's not going to happen. And so that's where my life's work Really pivoted and now it's all about that. It's all about uplifting the stories and educating the public to be like, mental health is not one size fits all, and we need to do better. We have to, for the communities that are suffering currently in our world, I get passionate all, yeah. Meriah: Thank you. And that is so interesting, like how you were really on one track and then it just [00:07:00] serendipitously evolved and expanded to include more of who you really are, huh? Jose: Yeah. I don't even recognize that person anymore. I feel like I'm living in my truth now. Meriah: And where would you like to see yourself in five years? Jose: In five years? I have a dream that our nonprofit will be able to open a holistic, fully radical, healing centric center for wellness that can provide more services nationally and do more than we're already doing. I think in five years, I want to see us being at the forefront of the mental health conversation and talking about how identity and mental health are interconnected. That's my goal for the next five years, I've always loved video production. I'm a film nerd, and so thinking about different media ways to talk about mental health has always been interesting to me. Meriah: Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more about how that. That identity and that inter intersection and all of that just really, it's all connected. Yeah. But I'm wondering, could we [00:08:00] also take a minute just if you could, tell, talk a little bit more about your nonprofit? What is the Phoenix Empowered about? Jose: Yeah. So, we have a, the two-pronged mission, right? The first part is uplifting stories, and we do that in a couple of ways. We have a blog that people contribute to. We're actually relaunching our podcast because. Ironic to the story I just talked about my career launch, the first season of our podcast. I'm going to name it. I'm going to say it. It was pretty boring. It was pretty sciencey and academic and some of the feedback I got was like, Jose, where are you? Like,
