Sotomayor’s Puerto Rican upbringing is a huge part of her identity, both in her personal life and in her work as a lawyer and, eventually, a judge. Both her parents and parts of their respective families immigrated to New York City (separately, but within weeks of each other) during World War II, and Sotomayor is thus raised in a tight-knit Puerto Rican extended family. Especially as Sotomayor recounts her childhood experiences, she remains acutely aware of how she and her family members embodied what it meant to be Puerto Rican—but also how they frequently flouted tradition as they made their lives in the city. As she gets older and especially as she gets involved with minority student groups at Princeton and Yale Law, Sotomayor begins to fit her Puerto Rican identity into a much larger framework of Puerto Rican history, the immigrant experience, and the issues Puerto Rico still faces about its own identity. Sotomayor allows that while being Puerto Rican may have provided unique hurdles along her journey, she insists that learning to think about her identity in a variety of different ways while also finding ways to take pride in who she is have been major contributors to her success.
In the first part of her memoir, when Sotomayor focuses on her childhood and particularly on life before Papi dies when she’s nine years old, Sotomayor describes her family’s Puerto Rican culture as tight-knit, fun-loving, and focused on food and quality time spent together. She describes in detail her Abuelita’s Saturday night parties—the delicious Puerto Rican food that Abuelita and all her aunties spend the day preparing for the parties, the cutthroat games of dominoes, and finally, Abuelita’s séances after the children are in bed. All of this paints a picture of pride in Sotomayor’s identity as a young Puerto Rican girl.
However, Sotomayor also notes that in a variety of ways, her nuclear family doesn’t embody several aspects of Puerto Rican culture. Her mother, Mami, works a nurse in the local hospital and is the only woman of her generation who works. Papi, meanwhile, struggles with alcoholism—which the entire family blames Mami for, due to the family’s overwhelming belief that women are always to blame for their husbands’ shortcomings. By taking note of the ways in which her nuclear family is seemingly less Puerto Rican (at least in the eyes of the rest of the family), Sotomayor learns at an early age that there isn’t one way to be Puerto Rican. This becomes even more apparent after Papi’s death, which heralds the end of Abuelita’s parties and sees Mami beginning to speak English rather than Spanish at home with her children. As times change—and as Mami sheds the burden of her husband—Mami, Sotomayor, and Junior embark on new ways to think of their identities.
As Sotomayor gets older and especially as she begins college, she begins to see her Puerto Rican roots in a more academic way rather than just thinking of it as a personal experience. Thus in college, when the opportunity arises, Sotomayor pushes for a class on Puerto Rican history. Having never studied Puerto Rican history, Sotomayor finds the class is eye-opening as she learns about its history of slavery, oppression, and mistreatment. However, because she grew up in a family where many members spent their youth in Puerto Rico, Sotomayor is able to put names and faces to the sorts of things she reads in her class materials. For instance, when she reads about women making pennies for hemming handkerchiefs, she thinks of her Titi Aurora and her stories—she was one of those women hemming handkerchiefs. All of this begins to help her understand that lived experience, history, and school aren’t at all separate. At school, a person can put their family history in context through what they learn and conversely, a person’s family history can influence what a person chooses to study. Later, in law school, Sotomayor takes this a step further when she writes a note for The Yale Law Journal on Puerto Rican maritime law. The note gives her the opportunity to look at Puerto Rico in yet another light—a legal one—and the interest and conversation it generates after publication impresses upon her that her identity is something to celebrate and own. This experience helps Sotomayor see that she can take pride in her identity professionally, not just personally and academically.
However, it’s nevertheless important to note that while Sotomayor may have had numerous opportunities to celebrate her identity professionally, academically, and within her family, she also experiences shocking incidents of racism and prejudice because she’s Puerto Rican. When she begins her first year at Princeton, affirmative action had only been in existence for a few years; no minority students accepted because of affirmative action have graduated yet. Occasionally, students, alumni, and school officials make her feel like minorities don’t belong because the government “forced” the school to accept them due to affirmative action, an attitude that Sotomayor encounters again and again over the course of her career. Despite this, Sotomayor remains firm in her insistence that minority students, professors, researchers, and employees in all fields are assets and belong—their differing experiences, upbringings, and backgrounds make the world a richer place. And most importantly, it’s essential to accept and celebrate one’s own identity if one wants to live a happy, fulfilled life, even if that identity is occasionally a hindrance.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Puerto Rican Identity and Culture ThemeTracker
Puerto Rican Identity and Culture Quotes in My Beloved World
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.
The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city’s dim glow, I thought about Abuelita’s fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people as family? The way they shore themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations [...]
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.
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.
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.
I’ve always turned the families of friends into family of my own. The roots of this practice are buried deep in my childhood, in the broad patterns of Puerto Rican culture, in the particular warmth of Abuelita’s embrace and her charged presence at the center of my world, the village of aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and compadres scattered across the Bronx. I’d observe how the tribe extended its boundaries, with each marriage adding not just a new member but a whole new clan to ours.
Ultimately, I accept that there is no perfect substitute for the claim that a parent and a child have on each other’s heart. But families can be made in other ways, and I marvel at the support and inspiration I’ve derived from the ones I’ve built of interlocking circles of friends. In their constant embrace I have never felt alone.
