Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor (3 page)

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.

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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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 diploma 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.

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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.
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“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.

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’).”
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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,
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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