To the Editor:

As a kid coming up in the Bronx, I was only distantly familiar with the foreign city all the adults were always complaining about. I knew “Albany” was to blame for schools, taxes, the subway, the weather, but since “upstate New York” was New Rochelle and everything further north was Canada, Albany didn’t factor into my personal day-to-day.

That all changed when my sister went to med school at Syracuse. She became the pride and joy of my Costa Rican immigrant family, the first of its members to come to the United States at 7 years old and now the first of its members to be a rockstar.

It was like we were Americans for the first time — not just in law, but by right. All of a sudden, my conception of New York expanded from the city I knew to the entire state it now signified. By the time I went to Stonybrook, “New Yorker” was a statewide distinction. I recognized Albany as central to that identity.

Not to be outdone, I turned my sights to law school — no small irony given my, um, adolescent exploits on Bronx streets. Then I was off to the District of Columbia as a 23-year-old with the same hustle I grew up with. Cocky and self-assured, but unaware that deep down I felt that I had a lot to prove.

Sure enough. Rubbing shoulders with the crazy-elite lawyers in D.C. humbled me. And after calling the nation’s capital home for the last 12 years, I can declare it the privilege of a lifetime to have spent such a formative decade learning from the heavy hitters in America’s imperial city.

They forced me to up my game. It’s the same hustle out here, but a bigger league. (I can’t wait to ball with y’all again.)  

The Bronx raised me. But it was the District that gave me an education, a profession, a cause. Along the way, I met colleagues who became mentors, friends who became family, and even opposing counsel I’d come to idolize as lions of this great profession of officers of the law.

And aside from all that professional growth, I grew emotionally too. I loved New York City, but it didn’t teach compassion and kindness. Those I learned in D.C., from the people who accepted me despite a chip on my shoulder roughly the size of New York State.

Now it’s time to challenge myself again, to do for New York City what Washington did for me. All that sentimentalism is what brings this letter back to Albany.

After daily observing the way Washington, D.C. influences the affairs of a nation, I’ve become so much more cognizant of how Albany influences the affairs of my state.

Am I an American? Absolutely. But catch me internationally and I’m introducing myself as a New Yorker first. I know that, if I want to better my borough, better my city, better the state that opened its arms to my family as “Americans,” my path will someday run through Albany.

Which is good, because I’ve only ever had a blast in Albany. I’m excited to see how the national policies I watched be born over bourbon in Washington will translate upstate, as statewide policies born over rye.

That’s for tomorrow. Right now, it’s time to bid adieu to my D.C. family. Y’all, I appreciate the lessons, the tough love, and being called out when I peacocked too proudly.

I’m now equipped with a bravado y’all made me earn, along with a lot more empathy. I can’t wait to bring that swagger back to the Empire State, now that my swagger has a heart.

I conquered the complex civil litigation game, so now I’m changing it up — trying my hand at white-collar crime prosecution as a prosecutor for the Brooklyn D.A.’s office. (Thank you, thank you; you’re far too kind.)

But I got my eyes on you, Albany! Because whatever laws I enforce in my hometown have to be intelligently crafted a bit further up the Hudson, beside those Amtrak tracks.

I was president of the Hispanic Bar Association, treasurer of the D.C. bar, a “top 40 under 40,” a mentor to a ton of law students and young attorneys. I litigated the District’s first CPPA notario fraud case and short-term rental case (creating District case law in the process), I won the nation’s first A.G.-litigated Rule 56 Judgment for a crowdfunding fraud case, I took a doctor’s license away for risking lives by prescribing opiates to cure depression.

You’re not wrong to fault me for a list heavily reliant on the word “I.” But it’s just that my own example is the one I can most immediately cite as being the result of the city around me. If only you could understand where I might’ve ended up if D.C. hadn’t given me a new sense of self.

It was the District — its people, its history, its culture — that deserves the credit for the things I can boast about in a farewell letter I’m publishing in the heart of New York politics. And the only reason I’m coming home is because, as much as I love D.C., there’s only one capital worthy of the dreams I discovered down here.

I’ll always be that kid from the Bronx. But the nation’s capital made me that man from D.C. Now it’s time to come home for Christmas, and for good, back to that New York State of mind.  

I’d say wish me luck, but thanks to you, D.C., I ain’t need it.

Richard V. Rodriguez

Bronx, New York