Focusing more than half of its length on Sotomayor’s younger, formative years, much of the memoir is naturally taken up with Sotomayor’s educational pursuits. However, Sotomayor makes it very clear that her life as a student doesn’t end when she receives her JD degree from Yale Law—a degree doesn’t automatically make her a lawyer, and what she learns in the classroom only makes up a fraction of what she considers her education. Through this, Sotomayor suggests that learning and education aren’t confined to a classroom. Rather, learning must be a lifelong process if one wants to continue to better themselves and achieve their goals.
Before the age of nine, Sotomayor is a mediocre student. However, she soon learns that this is only because she doesn’t have the right tools—namely, fluency in English—to help her succeed. Following Papi’s death in the spring when Sotomayor is nine, Sotomayor spends the entire of the summer reading. Mami also begins to speak English at home, and when Sotomayor starts school in the fall, she finally feels able to strive for success. This becomes one of Sotomayor’s most important lessons of the memoir: if children don’t have what they need to succeed, especially in cases where there’s a language barrier at play, they can never truly be successful. This, of course, isn’t to say that everything suddenly becomes easy for young Sotomayor. Rather, she comes up with ways to make her learning more productive, such as by breaking up overwhelming tasks or ideas into smaller, more manageable chunks. She also learns how to ask for help; it’s a transformative moment when she asks one girl in her high school exactly how to study for a test. With this, Sotomayor stresses that a person’s aptitude or intelligence is only a small part of what makes them a successful student. Instead, academics hinges on having the right tools; knowing whom, how, and when to ask for help; and being willing to persevere when things get difficult.
However, as Sotomayor begins college and moves on to law school, she discovers that her past education was lacking in one important way: while her high school teachers asked her to regurgitate facts and figures, her college and law professors want to see her synthesize information and come up with arguments. Learning how to do this, she suggests, is what education should really be about. This shift in thinking is also what she insists is the first step to learning how to think like a lawyer—something that takes her years to feel comfortable and competent doing. And this shift, importantly, takes place mostly during Sotomayor’s first post-law school job at the New York City District Attorney’s office, not while she’s still in school. There, by combining her knowledge of how to study with a work environment where she has to constantly form arguments as a prosecutor, she’s finally able to make the shift. Though it can push a person in the direction of learning to think critically, school is no substitute for on-the-job practice.
Throughout the memoir, Sotomayor repeatedly makes the that it’s one study skills (that is, how to go about learning something new) and one’s willingness to learn anything at any time that makes a person a good student of life and, in her case, a good lawyer. She notes that over the course of her career, she becomes an expert in such things as Fendi designer goods, as she represents Fendi in intellectual property suits; the American grain trade, since she assists a partner in reading over trade agreements to provide legal advice; and Puerto Rican maritime law, on which she writes a note for The Yale Law Journal that catapults her to sudden fame. These are all things she might not have chosen to learn about of her own volition, but things she needed to know about in order to do her job well. And in some cases, especially while at the DA’s office, she must call on her ability to break things down and learn quickly in order to prepare for a case in mere hours or, in a best-case scenario, overnight. The additional bonus, she insists, is that having to learn about all these things makes her life far more interesting—and while she may need to have this expertise because she’s a lawyer and a judge, these are nevertheless skills that will make anyone’s life richer.
Sotomayor also suggests that the main reason why students who are otherwise much like her—that is, minority students who speak a language other than English at home—fail to do well in school is because of the language barrier and the systematic way that minority students have diminished access to education (especially during the time that Sotomayor was in school in the 1970s). Sotomayor insists that Mami’s switch to English at home was a blessing that impressed upon her that she wasn’t an unintelligent kid—she simply didn’t understand what was going on in the classroom, something she believes is the case for many kids who speak English only at school. Once she understood what was going on, she was able to excel. She also mentions affirmative action policies, which had only been in place a few years when she began college (no students admitted via affirmative action had yet graduated when she started). By drawing out the obstacles that keep minority children in particular from succeeding and laying out the remedies, Sotomayor offers hope that children and adults following in her footsteps won’t have to struggle as much or rely on unlikely changes at home to enjoy the same successes that she did. And furthermore, by making her support for these policy changes clear, Sotomayor insists that it’s not only possible, but necessary to make education more accessible to everyone. Not everyone dreams of being a lawyer or a judge, but everyone, Sotomayor insists, should have access to an education that prepares them to be a lifelong student of any interest or profession.
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Education and Learning Quotes in My Beloved World
I often stewed with righteous anger over physical punishments—my own or others’—especially when they seemed disproportionate to the crime. I accepted what the Sisters taught in religion class: that God is loving, merciful, charitable, forgiving. That message didn’t jibe with adults smacking kids.
I have the carried the memory of that day as a grave caution. There was a terrible permanence to the state that my mother and her father had reached. My mother’s pain would never heal, the ice between them would never thaw, because they would never find a way to acknowledge it. Without acknowledgement and communication, forgiveness was beyond reach. Eventually, I would recognize the long shadow of this abandonment in my own feelings toward my mother, and I would determine not to repeat what I had seen. The closeness that I share now with my mother is deeply felt, but we learned it slowly and with effort, and for fear of the alternative.
The heroes were admirable if flawed, as compelling as any comic book superhero to a kid who was hungry for escape, [...] these immortals seemed more realistic, more accessible, than the singular, all-forgiving, unchanging God of my Church. It was in that book of Dr. Fisher’s, too, that I learned that my own name is a version of Sophia, meaning wisdom. I glowed with that discovery. And I never did return the book.
Now suddenly lessons seemed easier. It certainly didn’t hurt that I had spent the entire summer vacation with my nose in a book, hiding from my mother’s gloom, but there was another reason too. It was around that time that my mother made an effort to speak some English at home.
But the more critical lesson I learned that day is still one too many kids never figure out: don’t be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing. In retrospect, I can see how important that pattern would become for me: how readily I’ve sought out mentors, asking guidance from professors or colleagues, and in every friendship soaking up eagerly whatever that friend could teach me.
There it was: glowing white with toggle buttons and subtle flair of fake fur trim up the front and around the hood. As improbably white as a white couch, white as a blanket of snow on a college lawn.
“You like it, Sonia?”
“I love it, Mami.” This was another first. Unlike my mother, or Chiqui, or my cousin Miriam, or so many of my friends, I’d never cared enough to fall in love with a garment. But wrapped in this, I knew I wouldn’t feel so odd.
Meanwhile, the introductory surveys would involve just as much work, given their broad scope, as more specialized advanced courses and would allow me for the first time to cultivate the critical faculties that Miss Katz had tried to instill: understanding the world by engaging with its bigger questions rather than just absorbing the factual particulars. This was the way to be a student of anything, and learning it has served me ever since. As a lawyer and even more as a judge, I would often be called upon to make myself a temporary expert in some field for the duration of a case.
Minority kids, however, had no one but their few immediate predecessors: the first to scale the ivy-covered wall against the odds, just one step ahead ourselves, we would hold the ladder steady for the next kid with more talent than opportunity. The blacks, Latinos, and Asians at Princeton went back to their respective high schools, met with guidance counselors, and recruited promising students they knew personally.
The experience of hearing my Princeton reading echoed in family recollections had the effect of both making the history more vivid and endowing life as lived with the dignity of something worth studying. When, for instance, I had read that “a woman who takes ten hours to finish two dozen handkerchiefs earns 24 cents for them,” I could picture Titi Aurora holding the needle, my mother leaning over the iron.
It seems obvious now: the child who spends school days in a fog of semi-comprehension has no way to know her problem is not that she is slow-witted. What if my father hadn’t died, if I hadn’t spent that sad summer reading, if my mother’s English had been no better than my aunts’? Would I have made it to Princeton?
By the time I got to Yale, I had met a few successful lawyers, usually in their role as professors. José, the first I had the chance to observe up close, not only transcended the academic role but also managed to uphold his identity as a Puerto Rican, serving vigorously in both worlds.
Guidance of senior colleagues would add seasoning over time, but meanwhile we would need every scrap of what scant training would be provided during our first few weeks. I wasn’t the only one among us with minimal background in criminal law [...] But even if I had devoted all my studies to the finer points of the field, there remained essential lessons inaccessible in the classroom or from books and acquired only through the fiery baptism of the courtroom.
Certainly, no one could accuse me of being a soft touch, but talking with Dawn always reminded me of the human costs of my success, the impact on an individual’s life and his family. Her perspective allowed me to trust the voice in my own head that occasionally whispered: how about exercising a little discretion; having a little faith in human nature?
But as when I had described the Kitty Genovese murder in forensics competition, the difference between winning and losing came down to the appeal by emotion rather than fact alone. It was something Abuelita could have told me without ever having gone to law school. And it was something I apparently knew in high school, if only intuitively, before the awareness was pushed aside by years of learning to reason dispassionately at Princeton and Yale.
To be able to relate to jurors as their own sister or daughter might, with real appreciation of their concerns and the constraints upon their lives, often put me at an advantage facing an adversary from a more privileged background—a refreshing change after years of feeling the opposite. But even more important, that connection fed my sense of purpose. Each day I stood before a jury, I felt myself a part of the society I served.
Fran’s handing me the Fendi case as my first crack at civil litigation was a tribute not only to her personal generosity but to the nature of Pavia & Harcourt, where freehanded collaboration was ingrained in the culture. The people I worked with were comfortable enough in their own skin to share clients and knowledge easily. That spirit of transparent teamwork was a joy to me, and I strove to be as open and helpful to others as Fran and Dave were to me.
“I’ve spent my whole life learning how to do things that were hard for me. None of it has ever been easy. You have no idea how hard Princeton was for me at the beginning, but I figured out how to do well there and ended up being accepted to one of the best law schools in the country. At Yale, the DA’s Office, Pavia & Harcourt—wherever I’ve gone, I’ve honestly never felt fully prepared at the outset. Yet each time I’ve survived, I’ve learned, and I’ve thrived.”
