86 pages • 2 hours read
Sonia SotomayorMy Beloved World
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Complexity
A critical motif of the book is the importance of accounting for complexity. After her father dies, Sotomayor is surprised that her mother is sad and that Abuelita stops hosting her family parties: her parents argued incessantly, and Juli rarely ever attended Abuelita’s parties. She assumes the adults must feel guilty. Later, she realizes this was a child’s naïveté, a simplification of a complex web of emotions both women felt at the loss of their husband and son respectively. Sotomayor also describes herself as a “very rational child,” and she looked at her loss rationally (59). Yet she misses her father. Sadness coexists with the realization that their lives improve without him. Both are equally true. Similarly, Juli’s alcoholism tortured Celina, but she loved and depended on him.
Embracing irreconcilable truths figures into Sotomayor’s assessment of Blessed Sacrament in Chapter Ten. Her experience of the school was not always favorable. She objects to the corporal punishment and harsh criticism, but she recognizes that the school served its community by putting students on a path “toward a productive and meaningful existence” (100).
Complexity also allows Sotomayor to deepen her understanding of human motivation, which becomes essential to her success as a lawyer. In high school, her Forensics Club coach, Kenny, emphasizes the power of logical reasoning. As a self-described “rational child,” Sotomayor appreciates his lessons in constructing logical arguments and her study of pure logic in philosophy (59). Yet when she gives her winning speech on Kitty Genovese, she thinks about how to inspire her audience to feel connected and sees the value of appealing to their emotion. The lesson repeats when she loses two trials back-to-back and realizes she had not provided her juries with a moral imperative to convict. Emotional appeal also proves an effective technique for convincing Celina not to quit school when her doubts and insecurities get the best of her.
Further, Sotomayor’s framing of the relationship between the individual and the self suggests a paradoxical truth: neither can fully thrive without the other. She illustrates this in her discussion of PRLDEF. As a board member, she must learn to balance the needs of individuals with the health of the institution because they are interdependent. Staff members may want things that will ultimately harm the institution and thus run counter to their best interests. More broadly, the lesson applies to her belief in building bridges and the advice she gives minority students not to self-segregate. She recognizes that engaging with her ethnic community provides comfort and a sense of belonging, but she also values inclusion and recognizing “a larger civic context” and “broader sense of community” (238).
Education
Sotomayor’s mother believes strongly in the power of education to get “ahead in the world” (79). She is the only parent in her extend family who sends her children to Catholic school, and she sacrifices financially to do so. Sotomayor’s husband did not have an education, and it prevented him from advancing in his work despite his intelligence and creativity. He encouraged his wife to complete her high school education and pursue training as a nurse, and this made it possible for her to work and support her children after his death.
Over the course of her schooling and professional life, Sotomayor comes to see education as more than an opportunity to attain “a better life” (39). Education is a lifelong process that helps individuals grow in their understanding both of themselves and their world. Her high school history teacher, Miss Katz, is the first person to introduce her to this concept. She teaches her students that education is not just information but analysis and reflection. Each milestone Sotomayor achieves—matriculating at Princeton, studying law at Yale, becoming a prosecutor, entering private practice, and becoming a judge—brings her challenges and the need for new knowledge and ways of thinking. Thinking of education as a lifelong process enables her to meet each new challenge with curiosity and energy. Though she experiences insecurity and doubt, she finds comfort in the process of learning, and by focusing on the process instead of the product, she enables herself to achieve goals she may have thought impossible.
Books
Books play a central role in Sotomayor’s life. She discovers the pleasure of reading the summer after her father dies. While her mother retreats behind her bedroom door, Sotomayor retreats into books, finding comfort in stories. A book on Greek myths she borrows from Dr. Fisher “sustains” her that summer and beyond (57). She finds the Greek immortals more “accessible” than her Catholic God and is thrilled to discover her name, Sonia, derives from Sophia, meaning wisdom (57).
Sotomayor discovers the legal profession in the pages of Nancy Drew mysteries, a series of young adult novels about a teen detective whose father is a lawyer. Sotomayor identifies with Nancy’s optimism, her ability to see obstacles as opportunities, and her attentive and methodical approach to detective work. Nancy Drew inspires Sotomayor to become a detective. When she discovers her diabetes makes that impossible, she turns her attention to law (with the help of the television crime drama Perry Mason).
In the pre-internet era, owning a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica was the way to learn about the wider world, and Celina saves and borrows to buy it. It sparks Sotomayor’s curiosity and is her introduction to how much there is to learn. She experiences a similar feeling at Yale; when she feels “out of place and homesick,” she retreats to the library and is both awed and inspired by the library’s massive collection (142). When she adapts a Puerto Rican history course, she discovers Oscar Lewis’ 1966 book La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York. Lewis was an American anthropologist who studied poverty, and in his book, controversial among Puerto Ricans for exposing “dirty laundry,” Sotomayor can see elements of her family reflected back at her (167).
Learning from Models
Throughout her life, Sotomayor has learned from the people around her, for better and worse. From her mother, she learns selfless love and to remain emotionally distant. From her fifth-grade classmate Donna Renella she learns how to study. From Dr. Elsa Paulsen at the pediatric clinic, she sees women can hold positions of authority. While visiting Puerto Rico, she sees Puerto Ricans can do professional jobs. Nancy Drew and Perry Mason introduce her to law as a career, and Kenny Moy shows her a kid from the inner city can make it to Princeton. In her cousin Nelson, she sees a cautionary tale.
In these cases, models inspire possibilities, both positive (e.g. Dr. Paulsen and Kenny Moy) and negative (e.g. Celina’s emotional withholding and Nelson’s heroin addiction). Sotomayor differentiates models from mentors—people who have achieved what she is striving to achieve and who are willing to provide guidance. She has several mentors over the course of her career, but her first and arguably most significant is José Cabranes.
Sotomayor believes strongly that models and mentors are both crucial. Models enable people to imagine possible realities. While she values what she learned from books and television, though, she believes living models to be essential. This belief informs her commitment to outreach in the Hispanic community. As she explains in Chapter Nineteen, “When a young person, even a gifted one, grows up without proximate living examples of what she may aspire to become—whether lawyer, scientist, artist or leader in any realm—her goal remains abstract” (196). Seeing one’s aspiration “in the flesh” not only inspires but also “his or her very existence is confirmation of possibilities” that prove “[y]es, someone like me can do this” (196).
