My Beloved World

Midway through Sotomayor’s freshman year of high school, Celina moves the family to Co-op City, “Siberia in the Bronx” (110). It was still under construction when the family moved there. Bronxdale has become riddled with gangs, drugs, and arson, and Celina wants a safer neighborhood for her children. Dr. Fisher made the move possible by leaving the family $5,000 in his will. The rest of their extended family eventually joins them, including Titi Aurora, who moves in with Celina’s family, possibly to add further surveillance for the teens. The apartment continues to serve as a “favorite hangout” among Sotomayor’s friends (114).

She befriends Marguerite Gudewicz, a half-German and half-Polish girl whose mother hid Jews in World War II Germany. In their communities, marriage between a Pole and a German is “virtually miscegenation” (115). Though Marguerite’s father is prejudiced against Puerto Ricans, he stands up for Sotomayor when someone calls her by a racial epithet. In her new, more prosperous community of people representing “every imaginable background,” her “emotional world” expands (116). She sees both the differences and similarities among them.

At school, Sotomayor’s “intellectual horizons” expand parallel to her emotional life in Co-op City. Miss Katz, her history teacher, encourages students to “master abstract, conceptual thinking,” not just rote memorization, and to think critically about history (117). Though Jewish, Miss Katz teaches at a Catholic School because she was inspired by the priests and nuns she met in Latin America, who put their lives in danger to help the poor. She describes Sotomayor’s parish priest, Father Athanasius, in similar terms. Sotomayor had not realized what “a larger-than-life presence” the priest is beyond the pulpit (117). He is a tenants-rights advocate in Abuelita’s neighborhood who walks the streets with a baseball bat, negotiates “with gangs and landlords,” and works to renovate buildings “abandoned or gutted by arson” as low-cost housing (117).

At school, Sotomayor is not considered attractive. She feels “like everybody’s second choice” and is caught “off guard” when Kevin Noonan makes her “feel attractive in a way that” feels “new” and “not unwelcome” (119). They go to Manhattan for their first date, and he shows her his favorite spots. They become “inseparable” (120). He loves reading as much as she does, and they spend their time together at her apartment studying, watching television, taking walks, or reading together. However, his mother struggles to accept Sotomayor. After she introduces him to Abuelita, their relationship becomes official, and both families expect them to marry. 

To develop her public speaking, Sotomayor joins the girls’ team of the Forensics Club at Cardinal Spellman. The team’s student coach is Kenny Moy, who coaches the “self-selected high-functioning nerds” in “debate and extemporaneous speech” (122). Kenny is a brilliant debater who can dismantle opponents’ argument “utterly untainted by emotion” (122). He tells Sotomayor not to “talk with her hands” (122).

Sotomayor also learns formal logic in a philosophy class and loves it. She finds logic “mathematically pure” but also capable of transforming “into human persuasion, into words with the power to change people’s minds” (123). She reflects that Forensics Club prepares her to become a lawyer in ways she does not appreciate fully at the time. Participants are given a topic and told to argue it regardless of whether they agree with it personally. This requires both arguing and listening to the other side in order to “respond effectively” to opponents (123). Listening had become “second nature” to her (123). As a child, Sotomayor watched for nonverbal cues because they were “the key to survival in a precarious world” (124). Kenny teaches her a new way of listening: for logical weaknesses, flawed assumptions, and facts that can be challenged. While learning to use logic strategically, Sotomayor recognizes that emotion can also be persuasive.

She makes it “to the finals of the extemporaneous speech competition” (124). She is given three topics and must pick one on which to present a five-to-seven-minute speech, with fifteen minutes to “brainstorm and organize” (124). Sotomayor chooses the one topic that is closer to home: the brutal beating, rape, and murder of Kitty Genovese, a Queens, NY resident. Sotomayor begins by describing the events leading up to the attack, the attack itself, and its aftermath. Throughout, she considers her audience and what will engage them without alienating them. While thirty-eight neighbors confessed to hearing the attack, only one phoned the police, and then only after the attack was over. Sotomayor considers how to inspire her audience, themselves possible bystanders, “to step up and take responsibility” (126). She explains that what happened to Genovese happens “when we become apathetic about our roles in society” (126). She ends her speech by asking the audience if they will “be fully human in that moment and feel the obligation to care, to act to get involved?” (126). She tells her audience that Genovese was a flower poised to open but was “destroyed” by apathy, using her fist to punctuate “destroyed” (126). She wins first prize and tells Kenny that sometimes it is okay to talk with your hands.

Wanting to improve her income potential, Celina decides to pursue training as a registered nurse. When she becomes overwhelmed and intimidated by school, loses confidence, and wants to quit, Sotomayor uses reverse psychology to compel her mother to continue. She tells Celina that she and Junior will also quit school, which Celina is terrified of happening. Seeing how this “emotional blackmail” sends her mother back to studying proves to Sotomayor “that a chain of emotion can persuade when one forged of logic one won’t hold” (128). Just as important is seeing her mother overcome her lack of confidence with “a surplus of effort” (128). 

Despite Kenny’s emphasis on “cool, dispassionate rationality,” the movie Love Story, which was supposedly set at Harvard, sweeps Sotomayor up “with every other high school girl in America” (129). The film’s “pointy arches,” “book-lined walls,” and “leather couches” create an “antiquarian fantasy” college image for Sotomayor (129). At Cardinal Spellman, the college counselor’s default recommendation is Fordham and other Catholic colleges, but Kenny, who has gone on to Princeton and with whom Sotomayor has stayed in touch, encourages her to apply to Ivy League schools.

She receives her applications, writes her essays, and takes the SATs with little guidance, the norm for students not coming out of an “elite prep school” and lacking financial resources in the pre-internet era (130). Princeton sends her a postcard informing her that she is “likely” to be admitted. A school nurse demands to know how that is possible when the school’s two top-ranked girls only received a “possible” (132). Sotomayor does not respond in the moment but realizes the nurse wants her to feel “shame” (132). She wishes she had told the nurse that she works part time on weekends and full time during the summer and is on the Forensics team and in student government. The nurse’s question “would hang over [Sotomayor] for years” as she “lived the day-to-day reality of affirmative action” (132).

When her acceptances begin rolling in, she considers her options. She disqualifies Columbia for being “too close for comfort” and, with Love Story on her mind, schedules her first visit with Radcliffe (132). The campus’ location in the city of Cambridge disappoints Sotomayor, who had imagined an “idyllic haven set apart from the world” (133). In the waiting room, a woman wearing “a perfectly tailored black dress, a pearl necklace and earrings, and beautiful little pumps” leads her into her office, two lapdogs in tow (133). The tableau overwhelms and intimidates Sotomayor. Fearing she does not belong, she experiences “a suffocating panic” and returns to the Bronx without completing her scheduled visit (134). When she confesses her feelings to her mother, Celina says, “You know best, Sonia” (134). Sotomayor crosses Radcliffe off her list.

At Yale, two Latino students meet her at the New Haven train station in between attending anti-Vietnam War protests. Her Catholic school education equipped her to distinguish “purgatory from limbo better than” she could “the distinctions between socialism and communism,” which these students argue about during Sotomayor’s two-day visit (136). Their “down with whitey” talk embarrasses her as many of her friends and most of her teachers are white, and she feels comfortable moving between worlds “without assuming disguises” (136). She has experienced prejudice at varying levels but does not feel defined by it and does not feel it helps “to hurl a slur in reply” (136). While she “knew where these kids were coming from” and that they had things in common, she could not see herself welcoming Kevin to Yale for a weekend visit.

Kenny meets her at the bus station when she goes to Princeton for her scheduled visit. He gathers a small group of his friends, “exceptionally bright but slightly off-beat inner-city kids” with radical politics but more quietly so (137). They keep “at arm’s length from Princeton’s preppy mainstream,” who Kenny calls “strange privileged human beings” Sotomayor will not understand but who she will have no trouble keeping up with intellectually (137). At her interview, she feels comfortable chatting with the “professorial tweedy” admissions officer, who she finds “open and easy to talk to” (137). By the end of the weekend, she decides to attend Princeton and is offered a full scholarship.

The enthusiastic congratulations from anyone she tells bring home “the power of those ivy names” (138). While shopping for a winter coat, a saleswoman’s indifference transforms to “courtesy and respect” when Celina explains the coat is a gift for her daughter who is going to Princeton (140). Celina tells Sotomayor that she is being treated as a queen a work, including from doctors who never had a word to spare for her. She says she does not know what Sotomayor has gotten herself into, but they are “going to find out” (140).