Rosaura (Rosie) Mendez
Revson Fellow 2003-2004
Chief of Staff
Office of Councilwoman Margarita Lopez
Rosaura (“Rosie”) Mendez is currently Chief of Staff and Legislative Aide to Margarita Lopez, New York City Council Member for District 2, the Lower East Side. Ms. Mendez was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Puerto Rican parents, and began her community activism in Williamsburg. Her work in Brooklyn caused her to form alliances with other activists in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She eventually moved to the area, where she was elected Democratic District Leader for the 74th Assembly District in 1997. Ms. Mendez’s activism commenced when she first volunteered at Special Olympics, Most Holy Trinity Church Homeless Shelter, National AIDS/800 Hotline, and Orientation (formerly, Gay/Lesbian Welcome Wagon), while a student at New York University, where she received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1987. She worked for passage of Intro 2, New York City’s Gay Civil Rights Bill, as a student intern at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Her advocacy for gay rights eventually evolved into work at a larger community scale. She began work as a tenant organizer for a non-profit, community-based organization, and upon graduation from NYU, became active as a volunteer at the Brooklyn and City-Wide Housing Court Task Force, Tenant Unity Coalition, Neighborhood Crime Watch, and National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights. She continued her tenant work on a full-time basis, and later worked as a housing specialist at the Parodneck Foundation (formerly Consumer-Farmer Foundation). The tenant organizing work, and the concomitant battles that were waged in the housing court, eventually led Ms. Mendez to pursue the study of law. She received her law degree from Rutgers University School of Law-Newark in 1995, and was awarded the IOLA Legal Services Fellowship upon graduation. This award enabled her to work as an attorney at Brooklyn Legal Services in Williamsburg, representing individual tenants and community-based organizations in the housing and supreme courts. Her experience as a tenant organizer and housing specialist segued into a position as Manager of the People’s Community Development Loan Fund at the People’s Economic Development Project of the Lower East Side. In recent years, Ms. Mendez has been actively involved in the movement to oust the military forces of the United States from Vieques, Puerto Rico. During her Revson year, Ms. Mendez intends to study housing, land use, and urban planning in order to better analyze urban policies regarding the privatization of public housing.
(The Revson Fellow’s biography that appears above was last updated in 2003. Revson Fellows may update their biographies on this site by sending email to: revson@columbia.edu)
Revson was a glorious, guiltless, officially sanctioned and supported year of immersion into lectures, good conversation, and the bottomless yield of Columbia’s impressive libraries. It made a gift of that most precious commodity of all: time. Nor could it have been delivered in better company or in more congenial surroundings. We ate together, talked endlessly, traded on our elevated status to bug professors for tutorials, and forged friendships that endure to this day.
