[On March 9th,
Raúl Juliá
would have turned 76. To honor one of the most famous and talented Puerto Rican
artists, this week’s series will feature a handful of Boricua blogs, leading up to a special
weekend post on Puerto Rican statehood!]
On what’s
profoundly cultural about the Supreme Court Justice’s autobiography, and what’s
not.
When President
Obama nominated Sonia
Sotomayor to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court in
May 2009, he certainly knew he was making history by nominating the first
Hispanic American Justice. Yet I don’t imagine he could have expected how much her
contentious nomination debate and process would come to hinge on her ethnic
heritage and identity, and more exactly her self-image as a judge in
relationship to that identity. In the course of the media investigation into
her legal and professional career, a
2001 symposium speech was discovered in which Sotomayor responded to an
oft-quoted Sandra Day O’Connor point that “a wise old man and wise old woman
will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases,” arguing instead that “First
… there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that
a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than
not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”
Reading of the full text of the speech, hyperlinked above, is necessary before
fully analyzing this particular line, but in any case the quote does reflect
Sotomayor’s connection of her heritage to the law.
The controversy
notwithstanding, Sotomayor was confirmed to the Court in August 2009, and a few
years later she wrote and published an autobiography, My
Beloved World (2013). The first half of that book focuses fully and
potently on Sotomayor’s childhood in the Bronx, as the daughter of parents who
had moved from Puerto Rico a few years before her 1954 birth, and includes
extended portrayals of both parents, as well as her beloved Abuelita (her
father’s mother and the custodian of a number of Puerto Rican customs and
practices), her aunts Titi Carmen and Titi Gloria, and many other family
members. As a self-identified Nuyorican,
Sotomayor engages at length with what that Puerto Rican family and heritage (as
well as her annual summer trips back to the island) have contributed to her
individual identity and perspective. Indeed, by choosing to end this
autobiography before her time on the Supreme Court (perhaps to set up a future
second volume), Sotomayor turns the book into somewhat more of an autoethnography,
one that could be said to lay out an extended argument for the speech’s
argument about what Latina community and identity might contribute to the
development of a future judge’s professional and legal perspective.
Yet at the same
time, Sotomayor opens the book with a Prologue that narrates the origin points of
one of the most individual aspects of her life and identity: the diagnosis of
type 1 diabetes when she was seven, and her subsequent decision (due to other
individual factors including her father’s alcoholism and her mother’s
burgeoning depression) to administer her daily insulin injections to herself;
she concludes the Prologue with the first of those self-administered injections.
In the book’s Preface, Sotomayor writes that one of her main goals in writing
it has been to chronicle how “the challenges I have faced” (with “chronic illness”
chief among them) “have not kept me from uncommon achievements,” and thus to
achieve a particularly inspiring audience effect: “People who live in difficult
circumstances need to know that happy endings are possible.” While of course
some of Sotomayor’s difficult circumstances (including those aforementioned personal
issues facing her parents) were intertwined with her cultural heritage, and specifically
the experience of migrating to the United States from Puerto Rico, she chooses
to frame the book most overtly with diabetes, a far more individual and
intimate circumstance. As with any life and world, Sotomayor’s are both
communal and individual, and her autobiography powerfully narrates each level.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other PR connections you’d highlight?
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