My Beloved World

Every week, Abuelita sends a dollar bill wrapped in a napkin, which Sotomayor says is “no small thing, for her or for me” (152). Kevin visits regularly from SUNY Stony Brook, where he attends college, and Celina visits once or twice a year. On one visit, she brings Junior, Kevin, her cousin Charlie, and his girlfriend. With hotels too expensive, they have a sleepover in Sotomayor’s room then escape the cafeteria’s bland food for a reasonably-priced Chinese restaurant ten miles away that will become a favorite.

During her first year, she returns home for midterm break to find Celina panicking “in the final stages of getting her nursing degree” (153). She is terrified of the English writing requirement and asks Sotomayor to write her paper for her. Sotomayor refuses but promises to review whatever Celina writes. Her mother’s final exams are an even worse “torture” (154). She is riddled with insecurities and doubts, convinced she will fail. Sotomayor bets her a plane ticket to Puerto Rico that she will pass, another use of reverse psychology. Celina passes all her qualified exams on her first try, a rare occurrence.

In the fall, Sotomayor becomes concerned when she does not hear from Abuelita for two weeks in a row. Her mother admits that Abuelita has been hospitalized with ovarian cancer, discovered at an advanced stage because she had stopped going for her routine check-ups. Sotomayor wants to return home immediately, but Celina tells her to wait until Christmas break, only a few weeks away. By the time Sotomayor arrives, Abuelita is “delirious and hallucinating” (155). Family crowds her hospital room until Christmas Eve. As it begins to snow, everyone scatters, leaving only Sotomayor and her cousin Charlie. They decide to get a small Christmas tree for Abuelita’s room. As they walk the snowy streets, they share stories about Abuelita they heard or experienced.

Charlie tells her that when Abuelita was twelve, her parish priest recognized her ability to heal people of “unclean spirit[s]” and “mental afflictions” (156). Even those who could not be cured “found peace in her presence” (156). Charlie has “complete faith in Abuelita’s spiritual powers,” though Sotomayor is “too rational for that” (156). Back in Abuelita’s room, Charlie tries to feed her Jell-O-O, but she refuses. She looks at Sotomayor and says “Angelina,” her long-dead sister’s name. Charlies leaves the room, and Abuelita asks Sotomayor for a cigarette. Sotomayor tells her she cannot smoke in the hospital, but Abuelita insists. She takes one puff, then “the life left her face” (157). Sotomayor hugs her then yells for a nurse.

At the funeral, Charlie blames himself for bringing a Christmas tree into her room: the previous year, Abuelita had told him she would not live to see another Christmas. Sotomayor’s cousin Nelson, now a heroin addict, comes to the funeral, but the cousins, who have not spoken in three years, do not interact. In the weeks after Abuelita’s death, Sotomayor comes to understand her grandmother’s grief after Juli’s death, saying, “A piece of me perilously close to my heart has been amputated” (158). She realizes Abuelita died in the same hospital where Sotomayor was born. Many years later, she still hears her voice sometimes and feels Abuelita still protects her.

A week after arriving at Princeton, Sotomayor meets Margarita Rosa, a junior who comes from a poor Brooklyn neighborhood and “traditionally conservative Puerto Rican family” (159). The two become friends, and Margarita encourages Sotomayor to join Acción Puertorriqueña, a Puerto Rican student group. She joins during her sophomore year and finds refuge with like-minded people. Princeton’s “idyllic surface” belies “an undercurrent of hostility” towards Affirmative Action students, who are seen as having displaced “far more deserving affluent white male[s]” (160). As a result, Sotomayor says, minority students feel tremendous pressure to succeed, “even if self-imposed out of fear and insecurity” that failure would prove the critics right (160). Minority students could also feel they had “won the lottery” and must succeed for “all those not so lucky” who either “slipped up” (like Nelson) or did not know there were other options (161).

Acción Puertorriqueña’s focus is on freshman admission. Minority students recruit promising students from their former high schools and reach out to them personally after they have applied so they feel welcome. The group is also active in campus protests, though this does not appeal to Sotomayor. She retains, from her experiences at Forensics Club, a belief that it is important to listen and understand one’s opponent in order to change his or her mind. One of the group’s urgent objectives is to convince the administration to honor its commitment to hiring a qualified Hispanic. The university does not have a Hispanic faculty member or administrator, which Sotomayor attributes to “inertia” rather than intentional exclusion (163). Acción Puertorriqueña’s efforts result in Princeton hiring its first Hispanic administrator, “whose role was to advocate for students like us” (164). The group eventually adds “y Amigos” to the end of its name to welcome “nonaligned minority students” (164).

Princeton’s minority students share the Third World Center, which has an elected governing board that runs the facility. Sotomayor serves on this board but also does not want to isolate herself from the larger Princeton community. She warns “any minority student against the temptations of self-segregation” (165). She encourages deriving “support and comfort” from one’s own group but also reaching beyond it. To this end, she serves on the student-faculty Discipline Committee.

Princeton is one of few places in the United States “where institutional history overlaps the national narrative” (165). Sotomayor wants a history in which she can “anchor” her sense of self (166). No Puerto Rican history course exists, but students are permitted to propose courses. Sotomayor discovers an existing course and adapts and updates it. In it, she discovers the island’s unhappy history of “colonial neglect” and exploitation that changed little when the United States took it over in 1898 (166). The course also introduces her to Oscar Lewis’ controversial book La Vida. Though Sotomayor notes some Puerto Ricans’ dislike it for airing “dirty laundry,” she can see elements of her family reflected in it (167). At the same time, she recognizes the book lacks appreciation for the culture’s strengths that should be “nourished and cultivated” (167). Heated debates in the course repeatedly return to the question of whether the island should become a state, remain a commonwealth, or become independent. Each option has its unique “economic repercussions” (169).

Visiting Puerto Rico after the course, Sotomayor has an opportunity to see its strengths and weaknesses through the lens of her new knowledge and consciousness. The islanders’ political engagement strikes Sotomayor, especially as compared to Puerto Ricans on the mainland: Puerto Ricans on the island feel “fully American,” while those in New York, who had “experienced discrimination intimately,” feel alienated (171). Language, which can be an important link to the island, can become a “prison” that holds students back, especially when they do not receive support to transition to English at school.

Sotomayor reads an article about Spanish-speaking patients at a Trenton, NJ psychiatric facility who lack access to Spanish-speaking staff and organizes a volunteer effort. A round-the-clock rotation of students interprets and intercedes for patients. They also organize holiday parties with traditional food and sing-alongs. She finds the work so satisfying that she begins to believe “public service” will yield the “greatest professional satisfaction” for her (177).  

Sotomayor throws away a Phi Beta Kappa invitation thinking it is a scam to collect membership dues. Her friend Felice Shea insists she accept. Felice, the daughter of two college professors, knows “all the ins and outs of academia” and guides Sotomayor through her “blind spots” (178). After Sotomayor is awarded the Pyne Prize, Felice explains it is “the highest award that a graduating senior can receive” (178). Felice and her mother help Sotomayor pick out a $50 suit for the awards dinner, “the most expensive outfit” Sotomayor has ever owned (179). The award’s dinner fanfare fills her with the feeling that her hard work has “paid off” (179). Friends and family attend in droves, including almost “every living Hispanic who had ever graduated from Princeton,” all “overflowing with pride and camaraderie” (179).

The Pyne Prize is awarded both for “excellent scholarship” and leadership that serves “the best interests of Princeton University” (180). Sotomayor’s work on the Disciplinary Committee as well as with Acción Puertorriqueña and the Third World Center all factor into her receiving the prize. In her speech, Sotomayor says that the “greater purpose” of the latter two groups is to “foster a connection between the old Princeton and the new” (180). She expresses this in her speech to encourage future students to “[b]uild bridges instead of walls” (181).

She graduates Princeton and will attend Yale law school in the fall. Junior is pre-med at New York University. Though focused on their own lives, the siblings have grown into mutual respect and the knowledge that they can always turn to each other. Sotomayor spends the summer between college and law school conducting research at the Equitable Life Insurance Society’s Office of Social Responsibility, located in Manhattan. Also that summer, she and Kevin marry. Wanting to avoid her aunts’ and cousins’ mistakes, Sotomayor had not intended to marry young, but it makes sense for Kevin to accompany Sotomayor to Yale since his graduate school plans are uncertain. In her Puerto Rican community and his Irish one, that could not happen without their marrying. Celina wants her daughter to have the extravagant wedding she did not, and Sotomayor caves to her mother’s wishes despite her preference for a simple affair. Surrounded by family on her wedding day, Sotomayor is reminded of “those parties from [her] childhood that [she] missed so much” (186). They dance “into the wee hours,” then she and Kevin splurge “on a room at the Hotel St. Mortiz overlooking Central Park” (186). While the extravagant wedding was not as bad as she had feared, Sotomayor advises her cousins to “skip the pageant and take the money, but “[n]obody listens” (186).

Sotomayor and Kevin do not reflect on their decision to marry. They marry because they are expected to. Had they reflected on their marriage, they would likely have considered themselves a fairly progressive example, with labor, finances, and support shared equally. They find a place to live in New Haven and get jobs and a dog they call “Star” (187).

Yale is unusually small among the nation’s top law schools, indicative of its “commitment to fostering a supportive environment” (188). Sotomayor’s class of 1979 is composed of Rhodes scholars, doctors, a journalist, PhDs. Instruction is “a process of interrogation,” and students, Sotomayor included, work “like maniacs,” terrified of being humiliated in class (188-189). The method is meant to prepare students for the adversarial nature of legal practice. She has to master “a new way of thinking” (189).

Sotomayor does not feel isolated at Yale. First-year students are divided into small groups in which the intense pressure becomes “a bonding experience” (191). Her three closest friends are three male minority students, two of whom survived difficult upbringings and experienced discrimination. Like Sotomayor, they are from “the other America” (192). She participates in Yale’s Latino, Asian and Native American (LANA) student association and the “mainstream” Graduate and Professional Student Center (193).

Sotomayor meets her first true mentor in Hispanic civil rights activist José Cabranes, someone who has achieved what she aspires to and with whom she can have “sustained dialogue” (194). Her friend Charlie arranges an introductory lunch, and by the end of it, José asks her to work for him. Sotomayor immediately accepts. Her job is to conduct research for a book he is working on and to assist with daily legal work. While José moves with confidence within “the most rarefied corridors of power,” he is also “generous with his knowledge, time, and influence” (196). He maintains his Puerto-Rican identity while also serving beyond his own community. Being in close proximity to a living example of her goals helps make them less abstract.

In the absence of class rank and grades, the way to stand out at Yale is to have a “note” accepted into the Yale Law Journal (197). Having researched Puerto Rico’s citizenship question historically, politically, and economically at Princeton, she begins to see the question in legal terms while working for José. She writes a note that focuses on Puerto-Rican seabed rights and their potential for economic development, and it is accepted. Another confidence boost comes from her participation in the Barristers’ Union competition’s mock trials. The “courtroom playacting” helped her truly see that she could be a lawyer (199).

Her second summer at Yale, she is accepted as a summer associate at a top Manhattan law firm. She is assigned to contribute a brief for an important anti-trust case but struggles to articulate her argument. She realizes she is not yet ready to work “in a prestigious law firm,” a sentiment that is confirmed when she does not receive a job offer at the end of her summer stint (201). Not realizing this happens often, she feels “profoundly shaken” and fears she has “officially blown it” (201). She focuses on figuring out what she did wrong and fixing it by doing what she has always done: breaking her challenge up into smaller pieces and proceeding in a “methodical fashion” (202).

One upside of her summer work experience is having earned more money than ever before. She and Kevin plan a cross-country trip visiting places she had previously only studied and read about, and visiting friends spread across the country. As they travel, she considers her next career move. José had advised her to clerk (meaning research) for a judge, but she wants to start earning money “in the real world” (203). This is, she notes, a typical concern for minority students with financial struggles, and she advises them not to skip an opportunity to clerk as it “has become the most direct stepping-stone to higher levels of legal practice” (203).

A Princeton friend encourages her to attend a recruiting dinner for a well-respected Washington firm. One of the partners challenges her about Affirmative Action, implying she would not have been accepted to Yale were she not Puerto Rican. She is shocked but decides to go through with the “formal recruiting interview” and speak privately with the partner. He tells her he admired how she stood her ground at the dinner and invites her to Washington to continue the recruiting process. After the interview, she decides to complain formally to the career office and challenge the firm’s “right to recruit on campus” given the partner’s “disregard for Yale’s anti-discrimination policy” (209). Her case draws national attention, and she realizes she has “opened a bigger can of worms than” she had intended (209). Though happy to see offensive behavior spotlighted, she does not want “personal notoriety” but a law career (209).

The case is quietly settled, and the one certainty that remains after her anger and upset pass is that she does not feel the need to apologize for Affirmative Action. It fulfilled its purpose by opening doors for her. Once at school, she competed with her peers “on an equal footing” and succeeded because of her hard work and perseverance. Her achievements have been “as real as those of anyone around me” (210). People “working on Puerto Rican status issues” receive her law review note enthusiastically, providing “real-world validation” and a feeling that she might be “ready to go out there” (211).

One evening, on a “typical trek” to the nearest ladies’ room, Sotomayor passes an open door and sees a table set up with cheese, crackers, and wine. It is a “panel of public-interest lawyers” who are “pitching alternatives to private practice to a thin scattering of third years” (212). The final speaker is New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, “a legend unbeknownst to” Sotomayor (213). He captures her attention when he explains that lawyers in the DA’s office begin preparing and presenting their own cases within their first year of being hired. He says they are given more responsibility than any lawyers fresh out of law school and do “more in a courtroom than most lawyers do in a lifetime” (212). From her previous summer’s experience, Sotomayor realizes that working at a large firm “meant laboring in the shadows for years” (213).

After the presentation, she finds herself next to Morgenthau on the food line and begins chatting with him. He asks her what her plans are then invites her to come see him the next day at the career office. When she arrives, she finds he has already pulled out her resume and spoken with José, with whom Morgenthau has worked. Their interview extends well beyond the scheduled time and ends with Morgenthau inviting Sotomayor to visit his New York office.

José is aghast when she tells him she finds the DA’s office more appealing than a clerkship. One of her friends remarks on the poor pay. While Sotomayor realizes this, her instincts tell her she is not ready for a big firm, and she has always trusted her instincts. She had not previously considered her public interest options and was not encouraged to. At the time, Yale had few pro bono law clinics, and her “hyper-ambitious cohort” is not attracted to them. Morgenthau’s job “stirred a memory” of what had first interested her about a law career: “the chance to seek justice in a courtroom,” which had gotten lost “amid the immersion in case law and theory and self-doubt” (214).