My Beloved World Study Guide

Born in 1954, Sotomayor was her parents’ first child. As she explains in her memoir, both of her parents immigrated to New York City from Puerto Rico within a week of each other during World War II; her mother worked as a nurse in the local hospital while her father worked in manufacturing. At seven years old, Sotomayor was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, a diagnosis that shook her family. Two years later, her father died. Sotomayor attended Princeton, where she graduated summa cum laude. The summer after graduation, she married her high school sweetheart, Kevin Noonan. The two were married for seven years, during which time Sotomayor received her JD from Yale Law and took a job at the New York City DA’s office. Following this, Sotomayor was hired by Pavia & Harcourt, a commercial litigation practice group. While there, she worked heavily with the designer brand Fendi and became a partner in 1988. Throughout her time as a lawyer, she worked in several public service roles, such as on the board of the State of New York Mortgage Agency, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board. She became a judge in 1992 for the New York district court system, making her the youngest judge in the district and the first Puerto Rican woman to serve as a federal judge. President Bill Clinton nominated her to a seat on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1997 and in 2009, President Barack Obama nominated her to the United States Supreme Court. As a judge, many found her to be a political centrist; as a Supreme Court Justice, she often rules with the Court’s liberal bloc. She has received a number of honorary law degrees and in 2010, the Bronxdale Houses development—the development where she grew up—was renamed after her.

Sotomayor’s memoir touches on a variety of happenings in her parents’ lifetimes and in her own. Most important to her parents’ experience was Puerto Rican involvement in World War II. Many Puerto Ricans signed up to serve after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, and Sotomayor’s mother served in a division of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in New York City. The armed forces were segregated at the time, and while Puerto Rican soldiers from the mainland US who were fluent in English sometimes served with white units, most Puerto Rican soldiers served in entirely Puerto Rican or black units. In Sotomayor’s lifetime, some of the most important things she encounters are affirmative action policies, especially those governing college admissions. Walter J. Leonard, an administrator at Harvard, was the main architect of what’s known as the Harvard Plan, which was one of the first and most successful affirmative action policies in the early 1970s. Yale was also an early advocate for affirmative action. Louis Pollack, the dean of Yale Law School until 1970, advocated for admitting more black students, citing the fact that many black Yale alums became very accomplished professionals soon after graduating—and he articulated the idea that Yale had a responsibility to educate more black lawyers. Sotomayor spends much of her time in college and law school working with student groups to expand the scope of affirmative action policies to include Hispanics and other minority groups as well.

As Sotomayor notes in the preface to her memoir, it’s unusual for Supreme Court Justices to be as open as she is about their private lives, especially in published works. The most similar works by a Supreme Court Justice are Sandra Day O’Connor’s Lazy B, in which she details her formative years growing up on a ranch in the Southwest, and Justice Clarence Thomas’s My Grandfather’s Son. It’s far more common for individuals in other branches of government to write memoirs like Sotomayor’s. These include former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s No Higher Honor and Forgetting to Be Afraid by Wendy Davis. Sotomayor compares her memoir specifically to President Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, in that they both look to their childhoods to explain how and why they ultimately come to think the way they do. Sotomayor’s memoir also bears resemblance to Becoming, Michelle Obama’s memoir. She, like Sotomayor, details the struggles of fitting in as a minority student and what it’s like to navigate the legal field.