Rosalie Roman
Although she moved many years ago from the City of Buffalo, Rosalie Roman left an indelible arts and cultural legacy in the Puerto Rican community. She lived in a house on the lower West Side of Buffalo that she shared with other Puerto Rican women in 1978 where I met Belen Molinari and Elza Cruz. In the late 1960s a group of Latino students from New York City studied at the University of Buffalo. Rosalie was one of these students, graduating in 1973. I was in my senior year of undergraduate education at the State University College of Buffalo when I met Rosalie in 1978.
What is Hispanics United of Buffalo today after it merged with three organizations in 1989–Puerto Rican Chicano Committee, Puerto Rican American Community Association and La Alternativa–formerly called the Puerto Rican Chicano Committee.This community organization had it roots in the BUILD organization in the mid-seventies formerly called the Puerto Rican Chicano Committee of BUILD, INC.
Rosalie an early pioneer in developing the Puerto Rican Chicano Committee had organized El Centro de Enseñanza Puertorriqueña. This group collaborated with Niagara Branch Library in 1975 in an ambitious plan to develop a Puerto Rican library at the Niagara Branch of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library on Niagara Street on the West Side.
El Centro offered “mini” courses in the history and culture of Puerto Rico and pre-Colombian Art. Later with a $25,000 federal grant the Puerto Rican-Chicano committee housed a library, museum with indigenous artifacts, a puppet company and films. And Rosalie was at the forefront of El Centro.
She was very creative in designing many of the cultural motifs especially for the Virginia Street Festival for which she was one of the early pioneers of what is today the Puerto Rican Day Parade of Western New York.
Feliz cumpleaños, Rosalie.
Especially for Women in Buffalo, New York 