Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor

by Joan Biskupic

  She attests to the dreams and aspirations of America. It is in the national fiber to believe someone can come from nothing, work hard, and become something. But Sotomayor’s rise has not been without adverse reactions. The justice appointed for life still has her doubters, and it remains to be seen how she will answer them over time. She has played up her ethnicity and celebrity status as a “first,” in contrast to the man who put her where she is today. President Obama rarely gives voice to his experience as the child of a black father and a white mother, and in political Washington, only on the most exceptional occasions does he speak about race in a personal way.15

  This book offers an early look at how Sotomayor is publicly defining herself and compares her with other groundbreaking justices and her contemporary colleagues. The contrast with Elena Kagan, President Obama’s second appointee, offers one measure. Justice Kagan has become known as a shrewd tactician among her colleagues. She has been held up by White House officials as a model for Obama appointees to all federal courts—a judge who has the “potential to persuade” conservative colleagues.16 Kagan’s pattern on the bench and in opinions indicates that she sees herself operating strategically as one of nine justices. Sotomayor, in contrast, is more of a solo operator, engrossed in her own determinations on a case, less interested and adept in getting others to adopt them.

  As she challenges presumptions about how justices act and enlarges their place in the American mind, it may be that the personal characteristics that propelled her to this moment in history prevent her from being most effective. It is not clear that the popularity she has achieved outside the Court can be matched by a persuasive ability within its marble walls.

  She has begun to make her mark, primarily by seeking fairer procedures for criminal defendants. Her writings reflect the knowledge earned in a big-city prosecutor’s office and years presiding over trials, as well as the more personal experience of being a Latina.

  As surprising as her salsa dancing was at the first end-of-term party, some justices say it now seems to have reflected the core of her character. She shakes up the proceedings and confronts her colleagues in their private discussions of cases.

  When she asked them to dance, they did. On the law, they may be less likely to follow.

  TWO

  “Life Is All Right in America … If You’re All White in America”

  By the time Sonia Sotomayor was a teenager, in the late 1960s, the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City had grown from a procession through Spanish Harlem into an annual spectacle that ran for hours up Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Big bands played brass, and smaller ensembles strummed Latin rhythms on guitars. Majorettes with batons strutted along the street. Beauty queens threw flowers from floats, and men in colorful shirts flipped straw hats in the air. Amid the pageantry, mayors from Puerto Rico’s cities flashed broad smiles as they rode the route, while New York dignitaries and often the governor himself presided at the reviewing stand.1

  As hundreds of thousands of people watched along the avenue and on local television, the parade—initiated in 1958—offered a platform for Puerto Ricans to show their flag, literally, and to flaunt their island past and deepening connection to mainland America. The event attracted state and national politicians, including Democratic U.S. senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1966 and 1967, before his presidential run. The parade also became a venue for political agitation, as in 1971, when hundreds of the nationalist Young Lords and other demonstrators supporting Puerto Rican independence threw bottles and bricks.2 Even when the event was not marred by violence, it became increasingly raucous in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  Once, when Sonia Sotomayor was watching the parade on television at the home of a friend, her friend’s father made a remark that startled and stuck with her. She remembered him saying, “Aren’t those disgusting people?”3 References to “those people” were not new to this Puerto Rican growing up in the Bronx. She had heard bigoted comments before, sometimes whispered, sometimes spoken loudly, as at this moment.

  Sotomayor stood up and turned to her friend’s father. “Those people? They’re my people. I’m Puerto Rican,” she said as she walked out.

  Even as a girl, she had a way of declaring her identity in the bluntest terms. If people got in her face, she got in theirs. When whites taunted this Latina who sometimes traversed their neighborhood, she fought back with her fists. As she grew, she remembered the slights by people who doubted her classroom ability because of her ethnicity. Sometimes she raged quietly when she felt the sting of prejudice. Other times, in more formal academic settings, she went public with her complaints.

  As Sotomayor established her place, beginning with the conflicts she navigated with her mother and father and then with classmates and teachers, she developed strategies for taking on a world that might have dismissed her as one of “those people.”

  She was headstrong from an early age: if she did not like what she was being fed, she would purse her lips together, puff out her cheeks, and make it nearly impossible for her mother to get a spoonful of food into her mouth. When misbehavior landed her in a “time-out corner,” her mother would be the first to give in. Recounted Sotomayor: “She would say, ‘Come out when you’ve reconsidered.’ And I never would … She would have to call me out” from the corner.4 Sotomayor excelled in the high school debate club, and when a Yale classmate told her she argued “like a guy,” she had to admit to herself that from an early age she was defined by an aggressiveness not usually seen in females of her day.

  She was determined to avoid the failures of some relatives—cousins who married young or turned to illegal drugs. The worst was the experience of her father, who was depressed, alcoholic, and unable to overcome the vicissitudes of his difficult life. With little formal education and often unemployed, he would sit in a chair, stare out the window, and simmer in anger at his perceived exile in New York. Young Sonia would eventually see the drained Seagram’s 7 bottles in his dresser drawers and under his mattress. It was a bed he rarely shared with Sonia’s mother.

  As Sotomayor was standing up to her personal trials, the nation’s civil rights movement was expanding beyond African American concerns to Latino interests, particularly in the Mexican American hubs of Texas and California. Her assertion of her own identity coincided with increasing Latino visibility across America in the 1960s.

  The political activities of the era provided the scaffolding that would lift Sotomayor from the Bronx, through the precincts of the Ivy League, and ultimately onto the federal bench. Her childhood experience was distinctly Puerto Rican. Yet when she was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2009, she was a symbol for all Hispanics.

  * * *

  Puerto Ricans were relative newcomers to the mainland. But great numbers of Mexican Americans had been living in the West for more than a century and, throughout the 1900s, asserting claims for equal rights in California, Texas, and other states. In the 1960s, as Sotomayor was coming of age in the Bronx, Mexican American civil rights activist Cesar Chavez was organizing farmworkers and seeking better conditions for laborers in California. His escalating boycotts and strikes, which triggered violent attacks on picket lines, made constant headlines.

  The struggles of Puerto Ricans—for jobs, housing, and good schools—increasingly made the news, too, as the great postwar migration from the island intersected with the financial crises that gripped New York and other cities. Their plight would become grist for sociologists, including in the seminal study by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, first published in 1963. Popular culture also captured the simmering social tensions. In West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein’s adaptation of the Romeo and Juliet tale featuring a star-crossed Puerto Rican girl and Polish American boy, New York Puerto Ricans sing, “Life is all right in America … if you’re all white in America.” The 1957 Broadway musical, turned into a 1961 Academy Award–winning movie, may have stigmatized Puerto Ricans more than any other twentieth-century work, bu
t it captured the reality of the opportunities many Puerto Ricans found on the mainland. As the lyrics from the song “America” went on, “Free to be anything you choose … free to wait tables and shine shoes.”

  So, as the “Puerto Rican problem,” as it sometimes was called, emerged in the news of the day, in sociological studies, and even onstage, Sonia Sotomayor was living it.

  * * *

  Puerto Ricans had been migrating to New York for decades in search of jobs and a better life, but the period from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s produced the most consequential surge of people escaping the Caribbean island for the mainland. It was during this massive migration that Sonia Sotomayor’s mother and father arrived. Her parents were on separate journeys and did not know each other when they and other relatives left a place scarred by centuries of colonial tutelage and economic struggle.

  Puerto Rico’s history of colonization began when Christopher Columbus discovered the island in 1493, on his second major voyage, and Spain took control. The land produced abundant coffee and sugarcane and provided Spain with a western fortress. Yet its small size and dearth of minerals offered little opportunity for wealth. Spain failed to develop the island’s agricultural potential and saw Puerto Rico primarily as a military bastion. It remained an island of heartbreaking contrasts: a lush terrain and malnourished people. Diseases—malaria, tuberculosis, and cholera—were rampant.

  Puerto Rico sat on the sidelines during the struggle for trade and power among emerging countries. It failed to catch the revolutionary, separatist spirit that took hold in Latin American countries in the late 1700s and early 1800s. José Cabranes, a loyal son of Puerto Rico who would become a legal scholar, federal judge, and Sotomayor mentor, wrote in a 1974 essay that “a certain docility before more powerful economic and political forces is a notable characteristic of a people who were Spain’s last and most loyal colony in the New World.”5 Cabranes would later say that when he first met Sotomayor, which happened to be shortly after he penned that essay, he was struck by how she countered the stereotypes. Nothing about her was docile.

  During the Spanish-American War, in 1898, U.S. military troops invaded Puerto Rico. The United States officially took control from Spain with the Treaty of Paris that year. In 1917, with the Jones Act, Congress granted U.S. citizenship to all persons born in Puerto Rico, yet it did not accord Puerto Rico full rights as a territory. This action and the persistent ambivalence regarding political status—belonging to the United States but not being completely a part of it—would infect the island, sparking sporadic violence and feeding bitterness about how its people fit into American culture. A single, nonvoting delegate, known as a resident commissioner, represented Puerto Rico in the U.S. Congress. Puerto Ricans on the island could not cast ballots in elections for U.S. presidents or members of Congress. Puerto Rico was racially mixed, with people having indigenous Taíno, African, and Spanish and other European roots. Native-born Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens, but when they came to the mainland, they often were treated as foreigners and forced to navigate obstacles arising from America’s tragically durable racial hierarchy.

  The first major exodus of Puerto Ricans followed twin catastrophes: Hurricane San Felipe Segundo and the Great Depression. In 1928, Felipe cut a swath across the island, destroying 250,000 homes, one-third of the sugarcane crop, and half of the coffee trees. In those early years, most of the Puerto Ricans who migrated north came from rural parts of the island; they had little education and were unable to speak English, which made it difficult for them to find jobs. They were relegated to squalid living conditions, creating the so-called Puerto Rican problem in New York City. The backlash, according to a CENTRO Journal study, was fueled by newspapers and magazines across the ideological spectrum.6 In a 1947 story entitled “Sugar-Bowl Migrants,” Time magazine compared Puerto Ricans to “Okies” who had fled to California during the Dust Bowl. The article lamented that the majority of Puerto Ricans arriving in New York were “beggar-poor, had no prospects of jobs or any training.” Time added that the Puerto Rican economy simply could not support most of its population. The average family wage on the island was twenty dollars a month.7 It meant that people like Sotomayor’s relatives would continue to migrate to the mainland in search of a life, even if it was only a bit better than what they left behind.

  In their examination of Puerto Ricans in Beyond the Melting Pot, Glazer and Moynihan pointed out the economic roots of the Puerto Rican migration to the mainland United States: “The island lived off a cash crop—sugar—that had collapsed with the depression; it had almost no industry; in any case even in the best of times the agricultural workers who make up the majority of the population lived under incredibly primitive conditions.”8

  * * *

  Sonia Sotomayor’s mother, Celina, made the decisions essential to breaking the family’s cycle of poverty. Celina Baez was born in Puerto Rico in 1927—the year before the San Felipe Segundo hurricane hit—and grew up in Lajas, a small farming community on the southwestern coast. She was the youngest of five children, and after her birth, her mother became sick and delusional. She died when Celina was nine. Celina’s father had already abandoned the family, leaving the youngest to be raised by the older siblings. It was a dismal existence. They had no running water and little money. Celina’s older brother beat her regularly with a belt. For food, she often ate fruit that fell from trees.9

  Yet on an island permeated by poverty, illiteracy, and disease, Celina managed to develop a love of learning. As her daughter Sonia would recall in speeches with a decidedly optimistic gloss, “Although my mother had no money for books or pencils, she found a way around those problems by memorizing her school lessons. Each day, she would run home after school to spend an hour among the trees behind her home. There, she would line up her towering friends in her imagination and use a stick as a pointer to teach the trees the lessons she had learned for that day.”10 Later, in her 2013 memoir, Sotomayor acknowledged her mother’s grimmer existence and sense of abandonment. She said that Celina accepted her lot in life: “With their mother helpless and their father missing, it was kids raising kids and just her bad luck to have been the youngest. At least they sent her to school.”11

  During World War II, when Celina was barely seventeen, she lied about her age and joined the U.S. military so she could leave the island. She enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps and shipped out to Georgia for training at Fort Oglethorpe as a telephone operator. After training, she was assigned to the New York City Port of Embarkation. She met Juan “Juli” Sotomayor, who was born in 1921 and grew up near the capital city of San Juan. He had migrated to the mainland with his family during the war. Juan’s father died on the island when he was thirteen, and his mother, Mercedes, raised five children on her own. Juan’s father’s death deeply disturbed him; his daughter Sonia would later say it may have been the root of his problems with alcohol.

  When Celina first met Juan, she was struck by his youthful exuberance. He told her she was beautiful. He taught her to dance and paid attention to her as no one had ever done. They were a handsome couple. Celina was trim, with delicate features. She tweezed her eyebrows into sharp arches above her dark eyes and favored fashionable dresses that fit tightly at the waist. Like Celina, Juan was on the shorter side, but he had broad shoulders and a dynamic presence. He had thick black hair and looked dapper in the suit and tie he wore when he went out on the town.

  Juan’s mother, Mercedes, welcomed Celina into the Sotomayor circle, and Celina and Juan were married in 1946, just as Celina completed her service in the Women’s Army Corps. In the tenement apartment the couple rented in the Bronx, Juan painted the walls with bright colors and laid beautiful tiles. He had an artistic flair and an eye for details. When he decorated the Christmas tree, his daughter recalled decades later, he varied the arrangement of colored lights and ornaments and carefully hung the strands of silver tinsel.

  Celina used her GI benefits to earn a high school equivalency diplo
ma through a GED program. She found a job as a telephone operator at Prospect Hospital, on the southwest side of the Bronx. Juan, who had only a third-grade education and spoke no English, landed a job at a mannequin factory.

  Sonia was born on June 25, 1954, nearly eight years into their marriage. Celina returned to work as a telephone operator soon after her daughter’s birth and decided to begin classes to prepare for a practical nurse’s license. Juan, known into adulthood as “Junior,” was born three and a half years later.

  * * *

  Sonia Sotomayor’s birth fell shortly after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. That May 17, 1954, decision would begin desegregation and eventually clear the way for African Americans and other children of color to attend the same schools as whites. Equally significant for Hispanics, the Supreme Court issued Hernandez v. Texas two weeks before Brown, declaring for the first time that Hispanics merited constitutional protection from discrimination. Until then, lower court judges had issued conflicting opinions on whether Mexican Americans and other minorities who were not black should be protected from bias under the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment equality guarantee.

  Writing for a unanimous Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren said that the guarantee of equal protection of the law could be invoked by Hispanics—not just by blacks—with civil rights claims. The case had been brought by Pete Hernandez, a Mexican American convicted of murder by a jury from which people of Mexican descent had been systematically excluded. In the quarter century leading up to Hernandez’s challenge, no person of Mexican or Latin American descent had served on any Jackson County jury, although the county’s population was 10 percent Mexican American.12 “The state of Texas would have us hold that there are only two classes of people—white and Negro—within the contemplation of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Chief Justice Warren wrote in Hernandez v. Texas. But “community prejudices are not static,” Warren said, and over time new groups could deserve constitutional protection because of newly developed prejudices in America.