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Thunder Rosa is one of the best professional women’s wrestlers in the world, but the journey to get to the top of the mountain is one that never ends.
Rosa, whose real name is Melissa Cervantes, currently performs for All Elite Wrestling (AEW) and Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL) – two of the biggest promotions in North America. But while most professional wrestlers started their path to the ring at a school, Rosa was a social worker before wrestling caught her attention.
“I became a professional wrestler 13 years ago after making a decision to stop being an activist. I was a social worker, so one day I decided I wanted to be a wrestler after going to a wrestling show and just doing a couple of the shows there and feeling like that was the next step to take,” she told Pakinomist Digital in a recent interview. “I feel like the call was like – it was going to be a bigger platform. I just decided to try out and after I tried out, I fell in love with professional wrestling.”
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Thunder Rosa fights Deonna Purrazzo at AEW Collision on June 15, 2024 at the Covelli Center in Youngstown, Ohio. (Frank Jansky/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Rosa said the aura of pro wrestling is what got her hooked on it in the first place. Everything from the theater to sport.
She said she was up for the challenge even though she never played sports in her life.
“It’s everything. It’s all the details, all the different things that the sport entails, you know, the theatrics, the level of athleticism,” she said. “It’s like the fact that you could travel with it and also because it’s very challenging. It would be very challenging for me physically because I never liked sports and I just felt like I could do it at the time.”
Rosa said she had to start from scratch, “learning how to roll, learning how to train, learning how to build my body, learning like body control, very much like gymnastics, basically about a lot of different sports, and I think I just had to like take it together and then really be realistic with myself.” She said she had to work harder than anyone else in her training classes because most of the time she was the only woman in the class, if not the room.
She said there was never a moment she could point to when she knew taking a chance on professional wrestling was the right move. It wasn’t until she noticed she didn’t have time to go to work that she thought she could make a career out of wrestling.
“There’s not really a moment because I feel like when you get and you earn things, sometimes you feel like you have impostor syndrome and no matter what you’ve done, it’s like not enough, right?” Rosa told Pakinomist Digital “I feel like even when big opportunities came along, it was like, ‘Oh, I’m so lucky this happened to me.’ No, I wasn’t, I wasn’t lucky. It’s just people saw that I had the skills and I had the talent and I had the IT factor and they gave me an opportunity.
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Thunder Rosa fights Deonna Purrazzo at AEW Collision on June 15, 2024 at the Covelli Center in Youngstown, Ohio. (Frank Jansky/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
“I feel like when things started rolling with bigger opportunities in professional wrestling, that’s when I was like, ‘OK, I think I can leave my full-time job and become a professional wrestler.’ thought, ‘OK, I think I can do this. I think it’s possible. It’s going to be hard, but it’s possible.’
Rosa joined AEW in 2020 and began defending the National Wrestling Alliance Women’s Championship on “Dynamite”. She lost the title to Serena Deeb. She would win AEW World Women’s Championship gold for the first time when she defeated Britt Baker in a cage match.
She was the fifth woman to hold the title. However, she had to give it up due to a back injury.
Rosa told Pakinomist Digital that she took pride in helping women’s wrestling grow.
“It’s been really beautiful to see the journey that a lot of us have taken in the last six years here in AEW or even seven because we’ve seen something small grow so big to the point where we’ve had shows that have had 80,000 people,” she said. “The way that we or I were able to help the women’s division and grow and given a bigger platform with opportunities that has a lot at stake. I take that with great pride. There were a lot of things that happened and in 2021-2022 that really broke a lot of barriers for a lot of the women that are now in the women’s division and they’ve all made a bigger effort to get everyone in the future.
“It’s also been incredibly interesting to see how different companies have worked together and now they’re symbiotic with each other. They exist and live with each other’s collaboration and I think that’s changed the landscape of pro wrestling forever because we don’t live on an island. I feel like this subculture or this culture of pro wrestling has survived within this niche and I feel so big that it’s gotten bigger and bigger, but I feel so big that it’s gotten bigger. to see, how AEW has been crucial to those things.”
Melissa Cervantes, known as “Thunder Rosa,” dressed as Catrina in honor of the San Diego Padres City Connect debut, smiles during their game against the Colorado Rockies at Petco Park on Friday, April 10, 2026, in San Diego, California. (Meg McLaughlin/The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images)
Rosa vowed to continue using her voice to speak for women and children, which she stressed was really important to her. She also said she has her eyes on the latter part of the year with the Grand Slam Mexico.
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“I have a lot of things planned. I’m continuing to work extremely hard every single day to get better at my craft. I’m continuing to work really, really, really hard outside of pro wrestling to speak up for women and for young kids because I think it’s something very, very important and to speak up for my community. I’m continuing to focus on the opportunities that are in front of me,” she said.
“Right now we want to focus, like laser focus, on the Grand Slam in Mexico City. Then there are some big things happening in September, October during Dia de Los Muertos and like all that. There are a lot of opportunities in that period. So I take everything day by day and of course I want gold, but it’s not on me. I just want to work hard, when I have to keep knocking, when I have to keep losing. always win. And the last forbidden door, we had a great match with Divine Dominion and with Olympia, again I will continue to work extremely hard to get gold in the future, but if not, I will enjoy the journey just as much.
