Ronda Rousey takes pride in her Latino heritage: “I’m glad to be getting a lot more acceptance as really being a Latina”

Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano step into the cage for a long‑awaited showdown at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California later this evening.

After over a decade away from competition, both fighters are finally stepping back into the cage for a matchup fans have dreamed about for years.

Rousey’s last professional bout was against Amanda Nunes at UFC 207 in December 30, 2016. She lost via TKO in round one then quit the sport to start raising a family with her husband Travis Browne and has been largely out of competition since then although she still is heavily involved in training.

Her new coach Ricky Lundell coaxed her into returning: “I never thought I’d come back- it didn’t cross my mind at all," she explained. " I’d put a lot of walls around my heart when it came to martial arts, when I started teaching him it made me fall in love with martial arts again. It reminded me of the joy it gave me at the beginning”.

Rousey’s Latina upbringing

It might come as a surprise to some but Ronda, who was born and raised in Riverside, southern California and is blond and pale, has Latino roots and was recently included in the UFC’s Hispanic heritage month montage.

She revealed that her grandfather is South American. “I’m half Venezuelan," she told Fox Sports in February 2012. ”It’s kind of weird that in America you are what you look like almost because that’s how people treat you. And when I was younger and we went to Catholic school that was like 99.9% Latino. I was really outcast there. I had so much trouble learning to speak English that I never learned to how to speak Spanish. I didn’t learn to speak coherently in English until I was around six years old. So I didn’t look it. I didn’t speak it and I was kind of ostracized from that community a little bit".

She added, “I think it’s so cool that now people are starting to recognize that yes this is my heritage this is where our family come from. I’m glad to be getting a lot more acceptance as really being a Latina even though I don’t look like it”.

Tonight’s fight will be held at Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California and will be aired exclusively on Netflix at no additional cost to subscribers.

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