Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor (31 page)

She said the 2006 Michigan law forbidding racial criteria placed a heavy burden—“selective barriers”—on just one group. She noted that those seeking other types of preferences in admissions, based on family alumni status, for example, could and did lobby for such measures. In contrast, the only way to obtain race-based affirmative action would be first to win a state constitutional amendment lifting the one approved nearly a decade earlier.

Her opinion, joined only by Justice Ginsburg, immediately drew intense, competing responses that recalled the dual comments to her “wise Latina” remark. Attorney General Eric Holder, who is black and had encouraged people to talk about lingering race discrimination, deemed Sotomayor’s dissenting statement “courageous.” The conservative
National Review
called it “legally illiterate and logically indefensible.”

Fellow justices were critical, too, notably Chief Justice Roberts, whose views on racial remedies she used as a rhetorical weapon. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race,” she said, clearly mocking his view that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

In response, Roberts criticized Sotomayor for “expounding … policy preferences.” He threw her sentiment about minorities’ doubts back at her, rejecting the notion that it was “out of touch” to believe that racial preferences could reinforce feelings among minorities that they do not belong. Clearly irked by the airing of personal strains, he added that it “does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate.”

Declaring that she could not ignore the ruling’s “unfortunate” consequences for minorities trying to improve their lives through education, Sotomayor concluded, “For members of historically marginalized groups … the decision can hardly bolster hope for a vision of democracy that preserves for all the right to participate meaningfully and equally in self-government.”

TWELVE

Her Divided World

When Sonia Sotomayor left Washington for public appearances to promote her memoir, people lined up hours ahead of time to catch a glimpse or hear a few words from this singular justice. Her book tour, extending from January 2013 into 2014, was extraordinary. No member of the nation’s highest court had ever been paid close to the $3 million–plus she had drawn as an advance from Knopf for telling her life story.
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Nor had any justice attracted the kinds of crowds she did, with their mix of men and women, white, black, and brown, dressed in everything from conservative dark business suits to fruit-colored capri pants.

During her April 2013 visit to San Juan, on the island of her ancestors, people began lining up at 8:00 a.m., more than six hours before Sotomayor was scheduled to appear at the Plaza Las Americas, billed as the Caribbean’s largest shopping mall.
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Carrying copies of her memoir,
My Beloved World
, as it was published in English, and
Mi mundo adorado
, as it was titled in Spanish, they waited near store windows that were decorated for spring, complete with prom dresses and outfits in First Communion white, such as those Sotomayor wore as a Catholic school girl. By the time she arrived, shortly after 2:30 p.m., people were crowding around the stage where she would speak. Other shoppers leaned over railings on the floor above to get a look at the Latina who had reached the pinnacle of the law.

This Puerto Rican tour—four days of promotional events—came at a particularly important time in the Supreme Court’s annual term. The justices were wrestling with cases testing government policies intended to give blacks and Hispanics a lift in college admissions and to protect their voting rights in states that had a history of discrimination. Sotomayor and her eight colleagues would also be resolving their first-ever disputes over same-sex marriage and taking up an emotional custody battle over a baby with Native American roots.
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The Court’s caseload was not hindering Sotomayor, who had been on a whirlwind of promotional activities since early January. In bookstores and on university campuses from New York to Chicago to Austin to San Diego she was the center of huge events. People came to hear from her, in San Juan and elsewhere, as a person who embodied the American dream far more than as a jurist with certain legal views.

She took full advantage of her popularity, signing hundreds of books at a sitting and selling tens of thousands of copies in the first few weeks of publication. Actress Rita Moreno, a Puerto Rican who was the first Latina to win an Oscar—for her role in the movie
West Side Story
—was the reader for the audio version of
My Beloved World
. In an appearance with Sotomayor in Washington, D.C., featuring the book, Moreno said that she burst into tears when she heard that the first Hispanic had been nominated to the Supreme Court in 2009. Their public conversation in a large theater before a sold-out audience was not the usual judicial fare: Sotomayor revealed that she had no memory of her mother ever hugging her, while Moreno said that her mother had passed down her terrible taste in men.
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Sotomayor’s appearances in San Juan, just as with Moreno in Washington and elsewhere, offered the kind of atmosphere usually reserved for media celebrities. At the Plaza Las Americas, when it came time to greet her fans, Sotomayor emerged from a closed hallway between a shoe store and clothing shop. Accompanied by island dignitaries, she strode up onto the elevated stage. Spectators whooped and clapped from lines that had formed hours earlier and snaked past a dozen retail shops.

The contrast with the atmosphere at the place where Sotomayor spends most of her days—the mammoth-columned Supreme Court building—was striking. The Court is defined by hierarchies even in the way people line up. On any given day of oral arguments, there are separate, police-monitored lines for lawyers, for news reporters, and for the general public.

At the mall in San Juan, where all gathered together, everyone seemed to have a smartphone or camera to snap photos of the justice. Sotomayor’s paparazzi included people decked out in glittery jewelry, students whose parents had allowed them to skip a day of school, and even a maintenance man carting a bright yellow bucket and mops, who stopped to record her appearance.

Sotomayor wore a burnt-orange jacket over a taupe dress, and her usual mass of black curls was combed out. She addressed the crowd in Spanish and said she was thrilled to see so many people. She gestured with her hands, a habit she had tried to control as a member of her high school debate team. But moving as she spoke—moving all the time, really—was her way. She could energize any room, even an enormous shopping mall.

When she began signing books, people greeted her as if she were an old friend, an aunt, or a sister. After an hour the line was still moving but growing longer. Sotomayor left just in time to make an early-evening cocktail reception with local dignitaries at a nearby marina.

The next morning, she drove with an entourage from San Juan to Gurabo, about twenty miles south, and was back at it, talking about her life and signing books. This time her admirers were crowded into the Universidad del Turabo Pedro Rosselló Library. Large pictures of her book jacket—with her face on it—were everywhere. The festivities began with a private reception and luncheon buffet. About two hundred friends, family, and professors—some whom she had known for decades, others she had just collected along the way of this promotional trip—jammed into a suite of small offices. People were more interested in seeing her than in eating lunch.

For this appearance, Sotomayor wore a patterned black, orange, and white dress with a black cardigan. She looked dressed up but more comfortable than the day before—her hair back to its usual curly mass—as she moved effortlessly through the crowd of well-wishers, shaking hands, hugging, posing for pictures. After hobnobbing, sometimes in Spanish, but mostly in English, Sotomayor headed to a large auditorium, where she took questions.

As the main event began, her warmth infused the room. People broke into applause several times as she related the trials of her childhood in the Bronx, her determination to succeed in school, and her early career as a prosecutor and a judge. She spoke mostly in Spanish, but because hers is sometimes fractured, she turned to English when she wanted to make sure she was clear.

No matter the language, the audience was rapt. Hearing her inspirational tales, people wiped tears from their eyes at several points.

Sotomayor regaled them with a favorite case—when she intervened in the Major League Baseball strike of 1994–95—telling the story as if it happened yesterday, not from a judge’s perspective, but from that of a rabid fan. She said that her beloved New York Yankees were doing so well they might have made it to the World Series if not for the strike-shortened season. She said she faced Major League Baseball owners who were threatening to destroy the game with their demands related to wages, hours, and other employment conditions. A federal board had accused the owners of engaging in unfair labor practices. “I decided that the government was right,” Sotomayor said, simplifying the litigation and judicial order that brought the owners and players back to the bargaining table.

“I became the baseball judge,” she declared. It was a label with wide appeal, especially in Puerto Rico, the home of the legendary Roberto Clemente, who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and was a legend in the Bronx.

When Sotomayor answered questions from students and others in the auditorium, she never went on the defensive. She did not exude cynicism, as other justices sometimes did when they were on the road before crowds of lawyers. She enjoyed using her story to empower others. At times she lowered her voice, as if to say, “We’re talking, just you and me. Never mind the large audience.”

Although the baseball strike dispute was captivating because of its popular subject, people here had not come to learn about cases or the law. They had come to learn about this Latina who seems to exist to tell others how she made it and assert that she still is confronted by sexist or racist critics who think she is not up to the job.

Sotomayor’s mother accompanied her on the 2013 trip to Puerto Rico. In her eighties, Celina still looked elegant, her soft face displaying her beauty. Her manicured nails were painted with rose-colored polish. For this campus event in Gurabo, she wore a black jacket and black thinly striped pants, and favoring accessories more understated than her daughter’s jangling silver pieces, she wore small earrings and a silver strand necklace with a tiny jewel in the center. Despite some memory loss and trouble concentrating, she appeared to follow the exchanges as her daughter fielded questions. She smiled broadly at her answers.

It just so happened that no one in this university setting asked—as other audiences had—about parts of
My Beloved World
in which Sotomayor revealed the complicated relationship with her mother: “Mami gone, checked out, the empty apartment. Her back to me, just a log in the bed beside me as a child. Mami, perfectly dressed and made up, like a movie star, the Jacqueline Kennedy of the Bronxdale Houses, refusing to pick me up and wrinkle her spotless outfit. This was the cold image I’d lived with and formed myself in response to, unhappily adopting the aloofness but none of the glamour. I could not free myself from its spell until I could appreciate what formed it and, in its likeness, me.”
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In the book, Sotomayor explained that she came to better understand her mother once she discovered more about her difficult, emotionally bereft childhood.

But there were other touchy subjects, and when Sotomayor was asked about racial divisions in America and beyond, she began speaking in English again. “Today we are segregated in a different way, not easy to dismantle, segregated by wealth,” the justice said, adding that she thought it was important to equalize education to end economic disparities. But she also acknowledged long-standing racial, religious, and other cultural tensions. “We still have suspicions about people who are different,” she said.

The most emotional moment occurred when a student elaborated on his question with an excerpt from her memoir but kept choking up as he tried to read. The student stopped trying and said he wanted her to sign his copy of her book. “That’s initiative,” Sotomayor quipped, drawing some chuckles as the student bounded down to the stage. Once at the front of the room with the justice, the young man, in gray jeans and a black T-shirt, knelt next to her as she signed his book. When she finished, she gave him a kiss. Spectators applauded wildly.

*   *   *

It is hard to imagine another justice connecting with a public audience so intimately.

Even before the publication of her bestseller, Sotomayor was a different breed: approachable, human, like the people who came out to greet her. Her book brought her to another level of celebrity and public adulation. She wrote about her “darker experiences” growing up. She wrote that she had a pudgy nose, a mop of hair, and that it would take most of her adult life to feel pulled together. She became an everywoman with everywoman doubts.

Sotomayor dealt with her vulnerabilities directly, even by relating her professional failure as a summer associate at Paul, Weiss, her first major legal job. It was a devastation, she revealed, that haunted her for decades. She seemed to want to make sure her problems were hers to address, not her critics’ to broadcast. Her story was motivating: “If I can make it, you can make it.”

She said she wanted to offer hope to others. “I know that message can’t be recounted often enough for people,” she told an audience at Yale Law School in February 2014.
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She said she also wanted to hold on to her own identity as she was catapulted into the universe of the Supreme Court and national prominence.

Literary reviewers were as struck by her tale as the students and others who flocked to her appearances. “It’s an eloquent and affecting testament to the triumph of brains and hard work over circumstance, of a childhood dream realized through extraordinary will and dedication,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in
The New York Times
, likening Sotomayor’s book to Barack Obama’s memoir,
Dreams from My Father
.
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