Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor (5 page)

Such statistics undergirded what New York City officials and the media had been calling “the Puerto Rican problem.” Originating in the 1940s, the phrase reinforced the caricature of Puerto Ricans as people who arrived on the mainland with few skills and subsequently overburdened schools and drained social services. During the years of the great island exodus, the actions of extremists fueled the perception that Puerto Ricans could pose a dangerous political threat. In 1954, the year of Sotomayor’s birth, four members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party protested U.S. control of the island by firing semiautomatic pistols from a visitors’ gallery in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five House members. The four radicals—three men and one woman—shouted for Puerto Rican independence as they fired. Four years earlier, two nationalists had tried to assassinate President Harry Truman.

In
Beyond the Melting Pot
, Glazer and Moynihan helped cement the notion that Puerto Ricans could not assimilate as other immigrants had, and the authors added to the news media stereotype that Puerto Ricans were naturally inclined to be poor and uneducated. Among the many of Glazer and Moynihan’s grim assessments: “Nothing—in education, in work experience, work training, work discipline, in family attitudes, in physical health—gave the Puerto Rican migrant an advantage in New York City.”
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Only in hindsight did Sotomayor understand what she and people like her were up against. “There were working poor in the projects,” she said. “There were poor poor in the projects. There were sick poor in the projects. There were addicts and non-addicts and all sorts of people, every one of them with problems, and each group with a different response, different methods of survival, different reactions to the adversity they were facing. And you saw kids making choices.”
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At a young age she made more mature choices because of her personal health and family situation. Sotomayor won a scholarship to Cardinal Spellman High School, a majority-white Catholic school operated by the Archdiocese of New York and named for Francis Cardinal Spellman, New York’s legendary archbishop from 1939 until 1967. Soon after, Celina moved the family out of the Bronxdale projects, where drugs and gang violence were proliferating, to the new Co-op City, a housing project of thirty-five towers in the northeastern part of the Bronx. It was a safer area, with more middle-class families.

Racial tensions were spreading beyond the Bronx and New York City. In 1968, the year Sonia started high school, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, and blacks nationwide rioted. In Washington, D.C., and Chicago, large swaths of businesses were burned, reducing neighborhoods to rubble. At Cardinal Spellman, Sotomayor became aware of herself as an individual who was part of a larger civil rights struggle. She increasingly overheard comments that referred to her as a Puerto Rican or that had the ring of “those people.”

“Your parents let you know that you had to look out for each other,” said Charles Auffant, a Puerto Rican classmate of Sotomayor’s at Blessed Sacrament. “There was an unwritten rule of camaraderie. Puerto Ricans were still breaking in.”
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“We were shaped by those extraordinary times and by the communities from which we came, for better or worse,” said Theodore Shaw, an African American who attended Spellman High School with Sotomayor and went on to lead the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Shaw said that Sotomayor could not be pigeonholed: “If you came from Bronxdale and performed academically as she did … you were in your own category.”
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She mingled with white and black students, and her new Co-op City apartment became a welcoming place—like the apartment of grandmother Mercedes—for classmates to gather after school and on weekends. Young Sonia loved to cook and entertain, to be at the center of a party—a pattern that would continue well into her career years and even after she was on the bench.

Dating presented a trickier social challenge. “It had been established that Sonia Sotomayor was not much to look at,” she wrote years later with unusual candor. “I had a pudgy nose. I was gawky and ungraceful. I barreled down the halls of Cardinal Spellman, headfirst, unlike those who knew how to amble with a sexy sashay. My own mother told me that I had terrible taste in clothes.”
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Sotomayor said it seemed she was always “everybody’s second choice” for dates.

Yet Kevin Noonan, who came from an Irish American home, took an interest in his energetic classmate who moved easily among racial groups. Once she introduced him to her grandmother, Sotomayor’s family and friends began presuming the young couple would marry. But her family’s warmth was not reciprocated by his. “We didn’t go over to his house much,” Sotomayor recalled, “because his mother had a hard time accepting me. She wouldn’t say it to my face, but the message came through with a tightening of the lips, a slant of the eyebrow, a slam of the door. She would have been happier if I were Irish, or at least not Puerto Rican.”
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Sotomayor was undaunted, and she pursued the relationship with Noonan. Around this same time, as she was applying to colleges, she also ignored teachers who tried to dissuade her from considering Ivy League schools. A visit to Radcliffe College, however, briefly sapped her confidence as nothing else had. It played to fundamental insecurities, perhaps originally planted by Celina, about her appearance and style.

Sotomayor applied to Radcliffe partly out of her fascination with the 1970 romantic movie
Love Story
, written by Erich Segal, and partly out of her interest in winning acceptance to the best colleges. Yet in the admissions office on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus, she was confronted with everything that she was not. The woman who greeted her was flawlessly coiffed and classically dressed in a black dress and pearls. An Oriental rug, the first Sotomayor had ever seen, and a pristine white couch defined the office. Beside the woman were two small dogs, and the assault on Sotomayor’s sensibilities only increased when they began barking at her. The woman called to the dogs, and all three then sat on the couch staring at the awkward student from the Bronx. Sotomayor felt trapped in a world of ornamentation and pretense.
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As she recalled the episode, she said she did something she had never done before. She fled. After about fifteen minutes of awkward conversation, she left the room and told the receptionist that she would not be able to meet with the students who were to escort her around campus.

“What’s wrong?” her mother asked when she returned to their apartment in Co-op City. “You were supposed to be away for a couple of days.” Sotomayor said only that she realized she did not belong there. Neither mother nor daughter said another word about it. Perhaps Celina sensed the rejection in her daughter that she, Celina, had known in her own young life. The story would eventually become part of Sonia Sotomayor’s repertoire, marking the only time, she said, that she ran away from a challenge.

As searing as the Radcliffe experience had been, she continued to believe she could fit in at an elite campus. She visited Yale in 1972, and although it felt better than Radcliffe, she was uncomfortable with her student guides, who were consumed with antiwar protests, the revolutionary tactics of Che Guevara, and “down with whitey” attitudes. “Whether it was due to the indeterminate color of my skin or my very determined personality, I moved easily between different worlds” of color, Sotomayor wrote.
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She was also remarkably positive about her people and own place, so much so that when, as a student, she read Oscar Lewis’s classic
La Vida,
tracing one family from San Juan to New York and describing the despair of its circumstances, Sotomayor said she was turned off by the pessimism.

On the advice of a Chinese American friend who was a year ahead of her in high school and had gone to Princeton, she visited the school, which was about an hour south in New Jersey. The students seemed smart but easygoing, she said later, and to the surprise of this Bronx native, she was captivated by the Collegiate Gothic architecture and sweeping green lawns. The promise of a full financial scholarship was the final inducement.

Soon after she applied, Sotomayor received word that she likely would be admitted. She became aware that white students with better grades were not getting in. Others noticed, too, and the reaction of the high school nurse particularly stung. She remarked to Sotomayor that these high-ranking white students were not being admitted. “They’re ahead of you. Why aren’t they getting in—and you are?” Sotomayor recalled the nurse saying. “The question was loaded with a lot of suggestion that I understood.” Sotomayor later wrote in her memoir of the school nurse’s accusatory tone toward her, “My perplexed discomfort under her baleful gaze was clearly not enough; shame was the response she seemed to want from me.”
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Before she left for college, Sotomayor saw a movie that similarly touched her sense of identity:
12 Angry Men
, the Sidney Lumet classic depicting tensions among jurors as they decide the fate of a young Latino murder defendant. More than a decade after the original 1957 release of the film, she watched it with her boyfriend Kevin Noonan.

Set at a time when men wore white shirts and thin ties and often had a cigarette between their fingers, the movie opens with the trial judge’s charge to the twelve-man jury in the case of a youth accused of stabbing his father to death. The jurors learn that if the kid from the slums is found guilty, he will get the electric chair. In the jury room, the first vote is 11–1 to convict, with only the juror played by Henry Fonda saying he is not sure the youth did it. “We’re talking about somebody’s life here,” he says, imploring the rest of the jurors to discuss what they’ve seen and heard rather than vote quickly, try to get it all over with, and go on with their lives. Over the course of the next ninety minutes the audience sees how prejudices play out and what “reasonable doubt” means. As the discussion in the stifling-hot jury room continues and doubts are raised, the men who want to convict make remarks such as “You know how these people lie,” “These people are dangerous,” and “Slums are breeding grounds for criminals.” The film ends when the remaining holdout for conviction, played angrily by Lee J. Cobb, changes his mind and votes for acquittal.

When Sotomayor watched the movie as a young woman, she said she was struck by the idea that justice could prevail, and it would reinforce her choice of a career in the law. Yet she was also deeply affected by the references to “those people.” Such words, she said, made her flinch.

“You have to flinch,” she said years later after she had seen the movie again. “Those [references] are personal. They were personal when I saw it the first time. I had heard about ‘those people’ in my life so often.”
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THREE

“I Am the Perfect Affirmative Action Baby”

Sonia Sotomayor suspected that Princeton University would be challenging, but she had no idea what she would face when she arrived on campus in 1972. Her admittance to the Ivy League school changed the way people regarded her and her family. “I have to tell you, Sonia,” her mother had confided, “at the hospital I’m being treated like a queen right now. Doctors who have never once had a nice word for me, who have never spoken to me at all, have come up to congratulate me.” Celina presciently added, “What you got yourself into, daughter, I don’t know. But we’re going to find out.”
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Sotomayor had graduated near the top of her class at the competitive Cardinal Spellman High School, had smoothed out some of the rougher edges of childhood, and thought she was ready for Princeton. She was wrong. During the first weeks of school she spent most of her time in her dorm room and reverted to the shyness and doubt of her early grade school years. But in what would become an enduring pattern, she confronted her shortcomings, kindled her ambitions, and developed a strategy to get where she wanted to go.

When she discovered the holes in her Bronx education, she turned to professors for help. She made friends and built networks. By the time she graduated, she had earned some of Princeton’s top honors, but she never tried to emulate the polish or personal reserve of her more advantaged classmates.

Years later, when the magazine
Mademoiselle
looked at what had become of women who excelled at top colleges in the mid-1970s, it opened the feature story with Sotomayor. The reporter describes her telephone interview on a Friday night, minutes before midnight, just as Sotomayor has gotten home from the office. “Do you mind terribly if I eat my dinner while we talk?” Sotomayor asks. “I’m a diabetic, and I haven’t eaten since noon.” Later in the conversation, she reveals that she has just given herself an insulin shot. “I work hard and I play hard,” she says. “That’s the way I am.”
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Sotomayor worked hard to overcome her deficiencies, the doubts of others, and her own insecurities. Decades later she would be defensive about her achievements as some critics asserted that she succeeded only because of affirmative action. Such attitudes reflected the enduring dilemma of race and ethnicity in America, and the stigma was real.

In the early 1970s it was remarkable that this child of Puerto Rican parents had even enrolled in college, let alone at an Ivy League school. When she started her studies at Princeton, only about 10 percent of all Hispanics between the ages of eighteen and twenty were attending college.
3
But she was riding a wave of change. The civil rights upheaval of the 1960s that she witnessed in the Bronx had raised awareness among government officials nationwide. They perceived the needs of racial minorities as well as the political potential in cultivating a Latino constituency.

President John F. Kennedy launched federal initiatives giving minorities a boost in 1961 with an executive order requiring government contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure that they did not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin. President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed further by seeking passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and mandating that federal contractors recruit, hire, and promote more minorities.