My Beloved World

Celina is Sotomayor’s mother. Born in Puerto Rico in 1927, she was the youngest of six children. Her father abandoned the family when she was born, and her mother was an invalid who died when Celina was nine. Her siblings, primarily her brother Mayo and her sister Aurora raised her. Mayo punished her harshly, and she hated him for it, though she grew more understanding as an adult. Aurora worked as a seamstress and enlisted Celina to help her by sewing handkerchiefs. When Sotomayor decided to get a job as a teenager, Celina felt guilty for not being able to provide more for the family. She had not wanted her children to have to work as she had.

Inspired by the Puerto Rican men who joined the U.S. military to fight in World War II, Celina joins the Women’s Army Corp, despite being underage. Her job brought her to New York, where she worked in the U.S. Post Office sorting mail to be sent to soldiers serving overseas. In New York, she met Sotomayor’s father. She stayed in New York to marry him, and he encouraged her to pursue an education. She became a nurse, working throughout Sotomayor’s childhood.

Sotomayor calls her mother her second great example of “selfless love,” providing medical and emotional support to their large circle of family and friends (277). Celina suffered emotional scars from her childhood that caused her to be aloof and distant. Her inability to deal with her husband’s alcoholism caused her to retreat from the family, and Sotomayor felt abandoned by and angry at her mother for this. As a child, she witnessed Celina meeting the father who abandoned her for the first time when he was on his deathbed. The lack of emotion between the two revealed to Sotomayor how badly the man had hurt Celina. Sotomayor takes this as a lesson never to allow negative emotions to build up to the point that reconciliation is impossible. As an adult, she hears her mother’s story, and it provides context that helps her forgive and move forward. The two develop the ability to show affection and warmth for each other. 

Juli is Sotomayor’s father. He dropped out of school in sixth grade when his father contracted tuberculosis, working in a factory to help support the family. Acknowledged as intelligent and creative, he was offered a scholarship to go away to school, but his mother (Abuelita) could not bear to be separated from him. She brought the family to New York in 1944 in search of better economic opportunities. Juli met Celina through a mutual friend and fell in love with her. Sotomayor says he “did everything with creative exuberance”: “in his heart of hearts he was an artist” (70). Though his talent was appreciated, his lack of education made it difficult from him to progress. He enjoyed his work in a mannequin factory, modeling one of his mannequins after Celina, but it closed down in the late 1950s, around the time Celina moved their family of four to the Bronxdale housing projects.

Sotomayor is not sure exactly when he his drinking became excessive, but she believes much of the trouble began when they moved to Bronxdale. Juli had lost the job he loved and seemed like a bird in a cage. Sotomayor often caught him gazing out the window, sad and lost. Sotomayor believes he loved his children but not enough to stop drinking himself to death. Celina could not cope with his alcoholism, and while she was not responsible for it, she amplified the problem by screaming and berating him. Sotomayor recalls happy moments with her father. She enjoyed grocery shopping with him, and he was an enthusiastic cook. He always worked to support his family, but Sotomayor also realizes he was unhappy and does not blame anyone but him for his drinking. Though she missed him after his death, she recognizes that her family’s quality of life improved.

Abuelita is Sotomayor’s paternal grandmother. One of ten children, she grew up in Puerto Rico and moved her family to New York in 1944 in search of better economic opportunities. Her first husband died of tuberculosis, and she remarried Gallego, who eventually succumbed to Parkinson’s disease. As a child in Puerto Rico, she was acknowledged to have a gift of healing, and her parish priest called on her to provide spiritual comfort and cleanse people’s minds of spirits. Before Juli’s death, Abuelita was dynamic and social, taking “joy-rides at midnight” or having “picnics on the highway median” (157). During Sotomayor’s early childhood, Abuelita hosted Saturday evening parties that would continue late into the night. Family would gather to enjoy traditional PuertoRican food and music and intense games of dominoes. The evening’s highlight was Abuelita reciting poetry. At the end of the evening, she would talk to spirits, a kind of magic that Sotomayor understood as a gift her grandmother used for good, though others could use the same power for ill. Abuelita stopped hosting the parties after the death of her son, Sotomayor’s father.

Sotomayor calls Abuelita one of her “most immediate examples of selfless love,” a “healer and protector” who had a “generosity of spirit” (277). During her early childhood, Sotomayor developed a very close bond with Abuelita. Sleeping over her grandmother’s apartment, Sotomayor found refuge from the tension and gloom in her home, caused by her father’s alcoholism, her parents’ constant fighting, and the pervasive tension in the home. Sotomayor says her “understanding of my survival was bound up in every way with the fact of my grandmother’s protection” (277). She died of ovarian cancer midway through Sotomayor’s sophomore year of college, but she has continued to feel her grandmother’s blessing throughout her life. 

Nelson was Sotomayor’s cousin and her “inseparable co-conspirator” during their childhood, happily following her lead when she invented rambunctious games (24). Like Sotomayor, he shared a close bond with the Abuelita. Recognized as a science prodigy, he attended a Bronx high school but struggled emotionally when his parents broke up. The qualities Sotomayor loved about him when they were children together—“game for anything” and “sticking his neck out for a friend without thinking twice—became the “same qualities that would leave him vulnerable to the worst temptations” (104).

Nelson became addicted to heroin in high school then “flunked out of half a dozen colleges while his father refused to accept the reality right before his eyes” (158). Nelson’s excellent test scores gained him acceptance to school, but he did not show up for class. Sotomayor did not see him for several years until he came to Abuelita’s funeral “in a doped-up daze” (158). He left the funeral without speaking to Sotomayor, and they did not see each other again for several years. They reunited several years later and stayed in touch until his death from AIDS, contracted from contaminated needles. His death haunts Sotomayor, who struggles to understand how someone with so much ability and a strong support network could fall prey to self-destructive temptations. Before his death, he told her that he lacked her strength of will. Sotomayor attributes her will to her desire to help others, suggesting it is only when we can see ourselves as part of something bigger that we can overcome individual temptations. 

Dr. Fisher was the Sotomayors’ family doctor. He got Sotomayor into a pediatric clinical trial after she was diagnosed with diabetes. He also gave her a book of Greek myths that she loves, telling her she could keep it as long as she wanted. Sotomayor says she never did return the book. Dr. Fisher also offered to pay for a life insurance policy for Juli. He recognized that Juli was slowly drinking himself to death and wanted to help prepare the family. Sotomayor refers to him as a “saint” because he was willing to pay the family’s life insurance out of his own pocket if they could not afford it (73). In the end, Celina scraped together the necessary funds as she felt embarrassed to have Dr. Fisher pay the premium for them. He also left the family $5,000 in his will when he died, which enabled them to move to Co-op City.

Celina’s older sister by sixteen years, Aurora grew up in Puerto Rico. She worked as a seamstress and took care of her younger siblings during their mother’s illness. Celina moved in with Aurora at the age of nine after their mother died, and she described Aurora as strict and religious. Because of their age difference, Aurora and Celina were more like mother and daughter than sisters. Sotomayor describes them as “two trees with buried roots so tangled that they inevitably leaned on each other, and also strangled each other a bit” (113). Though they shared a deep bond, they were not able to show affection to each other, and they often bumped heads.

When she moved to New York, Aurora worked in a factory illegally as a seamstress. Sotomayor recalls accompanying her to the factory. She recognized Aurora and the other seamstress were breaking the law though they “weren’t criminals” (109). They were doing what they needed to do to survive. Sotomayor describes her aunt as an extremely frugal pack rat, who never “spent a penny on her own pleasure or bought anything that wasn’t strictly necessary” (113). She mended her clothes until they were “a lost cause” and never ate out (113). Aurora moved in with Sotomayor’s family when they moved to Co-op City.

As the coach of the Forensic Club’s girls team at Cardinal Spellman, Kenny introduced Sotomayor to constructing arguments for the purposes of persuasion. Her experience presenting verbal arguments helped her when she struggled to do the same in her writing in college: she was able to draw on her knowledge and apply it in a new context. Forensics Club became a touchstone experience, teaching her lessons about public speaking that helped her throughout her education and career.

Kenny grew up in a Chinese family in East Harlem, and his parents had a troubled marriage. He attended Princeton ahead of Sotomayor and encouraged her to apply to Ivy League schools, something she would not have thought to do without his suggestion. After she was accepted, she visited the school, and Kenny introduced her to his friends and convinced her that she could find a place for herself at Princeton.

Miss Katz was Sotomayor’s history teacher at Cardinal Spellman and “the first progressive” Sotomayor met in person (118). Though Jewish, she worked at a Catholic school because she was inspired by the efforts of priests and nuns on behalf of Latin America’s poor and marginalized populations. Her boyfriend was a Brazilian working against the military dictatorship. Through Miss Katz, Sotomayor saw her parish priest in a new light by learning about his service to the community.

Academically, Miss Katz encouraged her students to “master abstract, conceptual thinking” (117). Much of Sotomayor’s education to this point had involved rote memorization. She felt skilled at regurgitating facts but not at analyzing them, which Miss Katz encouraged her students to do. Like Kenny, Miss Katz becomes a foundational figure who impacts the course of Sotomayor’s future education. When she struggles writing a paper at Princeton, she recalls the lessons of both Kenny and Miss Katz, and their lessons provide scaffolding that help her overcome her challenge with writing.

Kevin is Sotomayor’s ex-husband. An Irish-American from Yonkers, he was her first relationship, begun in high school. They shared a love of reading and quickly became inseparable. They never reflected on their decision to marry but did so because their communities (his Irish and hers Puerto Rican) expected them to. They married immediately after college, and Kevin followed Sotomayor to Yale, where she attended law school.

She describes their relationship as progressive. Throughout their marriage, they shared household responsibilities, and each contributed an income. She followed Kevin back to Princeton when he entered a graduate program there. Her long commute and punishing hours as a New York City prosecutor did not help their marriage. In addition, his graduate program immersed him a world completely apart from Sotomayor’s, though she was happy to see him thriving and doing work that was important to him. Eventually, he confessed that he no longer felt connected to her. Their divorce was amicable, and they continued to date after they separated until he moved to Chicago to pursue his research.

Cabranes was Sotomayor’s first true mentor, meaning someone with whom she had a shared background, who had achieved what she aspired to achieve, and who was willing and able to provide guidance. Sotomayor met him through her friend Charlie, whom she worked with at Acción Puertorriqueña. Charlie introduced them over dinner, and José invited Sotomayor to work for him during the summer between her first and second years at Yale. She did research for a book he was working on about “the legislative history of U. S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans,” a topic that is especially close to Sotomayor (195).

She notes that José “could maneuver with equal skill and self-assurance, a kind of courtly grace, in the most rarefied corridors of power” (196). At the same time, “he remained infinitely generous with his knowledge, time, and influence, especially with young people” (196). He was Sotomayor’s first opportunity to “observe up close” a successful lawyer who also maintained his “identity as a Puerto Rican, serving vigorously in both worlds” (196). Sotomayor strives to do the same, and though she neither imitated him nor took all of his advice, she considers him a pivotal figure in her life.