Thunder Rosa On the Message Of Her Gear For AEW Double Or Nothing, Origin Of Her Ring Name

Thunder Rosa’s ring gear at AEW Double Or Nothing will have special meaning, and she revealed the details behind it in a new interview. Rosa spoke with the Casual Conversations with The Wrestling Classic podcast ahead of her AEW Women’s World Championship defense against Serena Deeb at next weekend’s PPV, and you can check out some highlights below (per Fightful):

On the importance of her ring gear: “Well, this Double or Nothing gear, it’s related to Day of the Dead. The face paint was given to me by one of my friends in the Bay Area. He thought it would be a great idea for us to attract more Latino customers to his company so they painted my face. That was the only place that I used it and then I went to Japan and I got a concussion. I wasn’t getting over oh, I was coming out every night like I was nobody. Then, my husband said, ‘Why don’t you just start using face paint. You are a luchadora, right? You don’t use a mask, might as well do something.’ So I started using that. I started using half-face paint and it got over really, really well.

“But the whole thing, it came out when — my uncle, I had a show in Los Angeles, my stomping grounds when I started wrestling, my uncle asked me who Thunder Rosa is, right? I give him a generic answer. then he said, he gave me the whole explanation that when he was seven years old, my grandfather and him in Tijuana, Mexico to watch wrestling. He was on his lap, my grandfather would happen to get a heart attack and die watching professional wrestling. So pretty much to sum it up. He says, ‘You know the meaning of Day of the Dead, right? You remember people that passed away in a positive way, or in a happy way for your whole life, even though you went to college or whatever, you were destined to be a professional wrestler, and you were destined to represent those who didn’t make it.’”

On her ring name: “Add to that, the reason my name is Thunder Rosa is that I worked in a place called Thunder Road. I used to work with kids from 13 to 18 years old who had mental and drug addiction problems. Some of them never made it. I shared the most beautiful stories with them, their goals, and their dreams. Some of them got murdered by the police, some of them committed suicide, and some of them are in prison. So I continue to represent all those kids, again, lost souls, right?”

On the meaning of her gear for Double or Nothing: “Then, this show coming up, Double or Nothing, this is one of the most elaborate things I’ve done for my gear. Time, effort, money. Like you were saying, I will be representing the lost souls of a lot of the disappeared women in Mexico in the last couple of months. I think in the last two years, over 750 women have disappeared from the border, the Border towns in Mexico, these are women that have gone to work, try to find a job to support their families, their daughters, their mothers, cousins, you name it, and they have disappeared completely. Nobody knows where they are, they haven’t found their bodies. So I will be representing every single one of them in Las Vegas.”