Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor

by Joan Biskupic

  Warren, a former California governor who understood the anti-Mexican segregation that permeated Texas, wrote that Hernandez met his legal burden of proving “that persons of Mexican descent constitute a separate class in Jackson County, distinct from ‘whites.’” Warren cited evidence that lawyers for Hernandez had gathered regarding community attitudes. “The participation of persons of Mexican descent in business and community groups was shown to be slight,” the chief justice wrote. “Until very recent times, children of Mexican descent were required to attend a segregated school for the first four grades. At least one restaurant in town prominently displayed a sign announcing ‘No Mexicans Served.’ On the courthouse grounds at the time of the hearing, there were two men’s toilets, one unmarked, and the other marked ‘Colored Men’ and ‘Hombres Aqui’ (‘Men Here’).”13

  Such evidence helped to demonstrate that although no Texas statute mandated official discrimination, local custom and practice had led to such bias. “It taxes our credulity to say that mere chance resulted in there being no members of this class among the over six thousand jurors called in the past 25 years,” Warren wrote as the Court overturned Pete Hernandez’s conviction.

  People of Mexican ancestry had a deep connection to the United States that put them at the center of early legal cases involving Latino rights. They had lived in what became the states of California, Texas, and other southwestern lands for hundreds of years,14 but they would long be seen as outsiders and face decades of prejudice and violence, including lynchings in the late 1800s and early 1900s. As late as 1943, Los Angeles was wracked by the “Zoot Suit Riots,” during which U.S. sailors beat scores of Mexican American boys and men and left them naked in the streets.15

  Thus, the Hernandez decision in the year of Sotomayor’s birth gave Latinos a tool for fighting bias and seeking equality. “With the Hernandez ruling,” observed Roberto Suro in Strangers Among Us: Latino Lives in a Changing America, “the Supreme Court affirmed that being nonwhite, being a minority, need not emerge from the unique experience of African-Americans as slaves and as victims of de jure segregation … Hernandez opened a door for the Mexicans of South Texas, and eventually all other Latinos would pass through that door.”16

  * * *

  In 1957, when Sonia Sotomayor was three years old, Celina arranged for the family’s move to the Bronxdale Houses, a low-rent, city-run housing project. The complex would, when finished a few years later, consist of twenty-eight seven-story redbrick buildings. In the 1950s the “projects” did not have the stigma they gained in the 1960s. When the Sotomayors moved into their unit on Bruckner Boulevard, New York’s public housing offered clean stairwells and neat lawns, not broken elevators, mounds of debris, and illegal drug trafficking. Many of the first residents, including the Sotomayors, had come from small, decrepit tenements. Their new homes evoked a sense of prosperity.

  But her father felt something different. Juan had not wanted to move away from the neighborhood of his mother and the rest of the Sotomayor clan. He would sit for hours looking out the Bronxdale windows. “My dad would … point to the empty lots that surrounded the projects,” Sotomayor said wistfully in one speech, “and tell me about the kinds of stores that would eventually be built on that land. One night, as we sat by the window, my dad pointed at the sky and told me that a man would someday land on the moon. He did not live long enough to see the stores built or to hear about the moon landing.”17

  Sotomayor later revealed the extent of her father’s detachment and alcoholism. As he sat at the window of their Bronxdale apartment, she wrote, he “stared in silence at the vacant lots, at the highways and the brick walls, at a city and a life that slowly strangled him.”18 She recalled the shame of hearing relatives talk about the dirty dishes in the sink and no toilet paper in the bathroom. Her mother was working and her father too drunk to manage the household.

  Juan’s drinking got worse when the mannequin factory where he worked closed, and he had trouble finding a new job. Eventually he was hired at a radiator factory. Celina, meanwhile, took on longer hours at the hospital. Mercedes and other relatives said that if Celina were not gone so much, maybe Juan would not drink so much.

  For her own compensation, young Sonia developed a deep relationship with grandmother Mercedes, who offered the kind of unconditional love she did not experience with her mother. “She was my childhood savior,” Sotomayor said years later, adding that although she often drove her parents crazy with her shenanigans, she “could do no wrong” with her grandmother.19 Mercedes—who loved music and poetry, conducted séances, and could make a party out of any occasion—allowed Sonia and her cousins to stay overnight at her apartment on weekends.

  Her walk-up apartment faced the tracks of the elevated train. Young Sonia would often gaze out the window and look at passengers’ faces as train cars rumbled by. She wondered about their lives and what kinds of jobs they were heading to in Manhattan. She later said that she also wondered whether any of the passing riders noticed her and her cousins at the window of her grandmother’s apartment and considered what they might become.20

  In Sonia Sotomayor’s early renditions of her family life, she featured her mother as an inspiring force. Only in the 2013 telling did Celina emerge as a woman who was also detached and so interested in projecting a “movie star” glamour that she resisted playing on the floor with her children or even picking them up for fear of mussing her clothes. Sonia felt clumsy and ill-attired in her mother’s eyes. She said that feeling of never being “put together” extended into her adulthood.

  “Even though my mother and I shared the same bed every night … she might as well have been a log, lying there with her back to me,” Sotomayor wrote. “My father’s neglect made me sad, but I intuitively understood that he could not help himself; my mother’s neglect made me angry at her. She was beautiful, always elegantly dressed, seemingly strong and decisive … Unfairly perhaps, because I knew nothing then of my mother’s own story, I expected more from her.”21

  Sotomayor learned early on to depend on herself. Before she was a teenager, two other experiences further shaped her character. Just as she was about to turn eight, she discovered that she was a diabetic. “I was always, always thirsty,” she told a group of schoolchildren decades later. “Then I started to do something that mortified me. I started urinating in my bed.” Her parents took her to the hospital for tests. When a lab technician pulled out his needle to draw blood, she panicked. She jumped from her chair and ran out of the hospital and hid under a parked car. “I kept trying to get into a little ball,” she recalled.22

  The worst part of the diabetes diagnosis, she said, was seeing her mother cry for the first time and—at least for that moment—appear helpless. Celina was aware of the prognosis for a child with diabetes in the early 1960s. She feared amputations and blindness. But Celina soon confronted her fears and brought her young daughter to the Jacobi Medical Center, a public hospital in the Bronx with a juvenile diabetes specialty, where her daughter learned to manage her condition.

  It fell to Sotomayor to give herself insulin shots before she left for school. In the early morning, her mother was working at the hospital and her alcoholic father’s hands were too jittery. “When my father made his first attempt at giving me the insulin shot,” Sotomayor later wrote, “… his hands were shaking so much I was afraid he would miss my arm entirely and stab me in the face. He had to jab hard just to steady his aim.” Along with causing her pain, the incident accelerated her mother’s recriminations toward the father: “‘Whose fault is it your hands tremble?’”23

  Each morning before school Sotomayor sterilized her glass syringes and metal needles. She would use a pot of water her mother had set on the stove before leaving for the hospital. She would turn on the burner, wait for the water to boil, and then climb up on a chair and drop in her equipment. She learned to extract blood with a little razor and to test her urine for her sugar count. She also quickly figured out that if she failed to check
her blood sugar and take her insulin, she could become sick.

  Physicians warned that her career options would be limited, and she believed she had to abandon a dream of becoming a detective, born of her interest in the Nancy Drew mystery book series. Intrigued by the character of Perry Mason, played by Raymond Burr, on the television show that ran from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s, she decided to set her sights on becoming a lawyer instead. It is a testament to her mental strength that this child of the Bronx believed nothing could interfere with her becoming a lawyer. But the diabetes also gave her a sense of urgency about her goals. She had heard the family whispers that she could die young.

  The second shock of her childhood came when she was nine years old. Her father died of complications from his alcoholism. For Sotomayor it was one more shove out of childhood into adulthood. She adopted her mother’s stoicism. Celina, at age nine, had coped with her mother’s death. Now daughter Sonia had to do the same with her father’s passing. Celina moved the family into a smaller apartment in the Bronxdale Houses and decided the only way to ensure her economic independence was to become a registered nurse. It meant taking out loans for college classes and spending even less time with the children.

  Also motivated by the circumstances, young Sonia started working harder at Blessed Sacrament, the grammar school she and Junior attended. The Sotomayor children were sent there for the education and discipline, not because a crucifix hung in every classroom. The family was not particularly religious, Sotomayor would say later. In her effort to become a better student and win the gold stars the nuns doled out, she approached one of the smarter girls in the class and asked about her study techniques. The girl taught her how to underline important information and take notes. Sotomayor said later that in that moment she received not only study tips but the lifelong lesson that she could get help if she asked for it.

  She also learned in these years how to handle the bitterness she felt when she was excluded. She desperately wanted to be part of the group of Blessed Sacrament students chosen to see Pope Paul VI in 1965 as he made a historic one-day visit to New York City. But she was not picked, she believed, because her family did not attend regular Sunday Mass at Blessed Sacrament. She watched the event on television and told herself that she was seeing much more than the students among the crowd of a million people on the streets. When she graduated from Blessed Sacrament, a nun wrote in her yearbook, “This girl’s ambitions, odd as they may seem, are to become an attorney and someday marry.”24

  It would become clear that Sotomayor defied low expectations.

  * * *

  Her growth coincided with the progress of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos as a political force. One of the nation’s early voting rights claims came from another determined Puerto Rican mother, Martha Cardona, who lived with her children in the Bronx. Cardona had moved from Puerto Rico to New York in 1948, raised three children, and become active in her community. In the summer of 1963, state election officials refused to let her register to vote, because she could not satisfy the state’s English literacy requirement. She sued, saying that the Board of Elections should either register her as a qualified voter or provide the literacy test in Spanish. She was helped in her lawsuit by local politicians eager to tap into the votes of thousands of Puerto Ricans in their districts. They would not be the first nor the last politicians who understood the value of wooing Hispanics.

  Cardona lost in lower courts, but when the Supreme Court took up her appeal in 1966, it endorsed her right to vote. The Cardona decision followed the lead of that June day’s ruling in Katzenbach v. Morgan, which upheld a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that abolished English literacy tests and said that no one who had completed the sixth grade in an accredited Puerto Rican school could be barred from voting. In Cardona’s case, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., noted that Katzenbach v. Morgan endorsed federal power to prevent discrimination in voting rights. In the new Katzenbach case, the Court, which earlier had permitted state literacy tests, said Congress’s power under the Constitution’s supremacy clause gives it particular authority to ban them. So, Brennan said, as long as Cardona, who filed her case before the 1965 act was passed, could show that she had completed a sixth-grade equivalency in Spanish, she would be able to cast a ballot. The paired cases of Katzenbach v. Morgan and Cardona v. Power offered Puerto Ricans greater access to the voting booth and with other voting rights rulings of the era set Latinos on a course to be part of American democracy.25

  A few years later, in a voting rights case important to minorities in the Southwest, White v. Regester, the Supreme Court said that Latinos and blacks in parts of Texas were entitled to a single-member voting district because multimember districts were diluting their voting strength. The justices adopted a lower court finding that the Bexar County Mexican American community, concentrated on the west side of San Antonio, faced discrimination in education, economic life, and politics. Single-member districts, giving minority voters in a distinct region greater potential to elect one of their own, would bring the Mexican American community into the “full stream of political life” by spurring registration and voting, the Court said.26

  But the daily reality for Latinos through the late 1960s and early 1970s was not full participation, particularly for urban Puerto Ricans who faced poverty, dead-end jobs, and police brutality. The Supreme Court’s Katzenbach and Cardona voting rights decisions happened to come on June 13, 1966, as a major riot—one of many involving Puerto Ricans during the 1960s—erupted in Chicago, another city that drew Puerto Rican migrants. After World War II, large numbers of Puerto Rican workers had moved to the great manufacturing hub in the Midwest. Migrants in Chicago, however, had a generally low public presence, and just a year before the June 1966 rioting, The Chicago Daily News published a story headlined “Chicago’s Proud Puerto Ricans.” The article characterized Puerto Ricans there as the “upbeat West Side Story” and described the local migrants as “peaceful and furiously ambitious,” compared with New York counterparts “wielding knives in gang fights.”27 The story failed to capture the conflict on the horizon.

  The Chicago riot of June 1966 began when a white police officer shot a twenty-year-old Puerto Rican man after a Puerto Rican Day Parade celebration in the Humboldt Park neighborhood on the city’s West Side. Youths began burning businesses along Division Street, the spine of the neighborhood. More than fifty buildings were destroyed and dozens of people arrested.28 The riot was typical of the Puerto Rican–initiated disturbances in major cities throughout the decade. On the surface, it was a response to perceived police brutality, yet it more deeply reflected conditions of poverty and lack of jobs. This was the economic despair and violence from which Celina Sotomayor labored to protect her two children.

  In New York, one of the earliest riots involving Puerto Ricans occurred in August 1964, on the Lower East Side, ignited by a brawl with blacks.29 More deadly rioting by Puerto Ricans broke out three years later, in the summer of 1967. At least ten people were killed and several homes burned to the ground after three successive nights of disturbances in East Harlem and the South Bronx, not far from where the Sotomayor family lived. The rioting, following a series of questionable police arrests of Puerto Rican men, began when mobs started overturning cars and setting them on fire. Men pelted police with bricks and bottles.30

  Newspapers of the day relied on stereotypes of Puerto Ricans as a “docile” people lacking aspirations, reflecting a complicated image created by Puerto Rico’s long history under Spanish and American control and the subjugation of its culture. A 1967 New York Times account of Puerto Rican rioting, under the headline “Puerto Rican Story: A Sensitive People Erupt,” observed that “the shock of the city’s first Puerto Rican mass disorders … came against a background in which Puerto Ricans have historically been considered passive.” The Reverend James Sugrue, pastor of All Saints Church in Harlem, was quoted as saying, “We never expected this to happen in this part of Harlem. It’s not that the Puerto
Ricans aren’t as bad off as the Negroes, but the Puerto Ricans don’t have the Negroes’ sense of ‘revolution of expectations.’ The Puerto Ricans sort of celebrate their own poverty.”31

  Sonia Sotomayor was anything but a submissive child without aspirations, but the statistics for her contemporaries were grim. When she was starting school in the Bronx, Puerto Rican children had the lowest education attainment rates for New York City, about seven school years. The unemployment rate for New York Puerto Ricans in 1960 was 10 percent, compared with 7 percent for blacks and 5 percent for whites.32

  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.”33