Puerto Ricans Celebrate a Wise Latina

We try not to get too political here at Tonic, but how can we stay neutral as Puerto Ricans throughout the country swell with enormous pride because the US Senate confirmed Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination?

"This is about the acceptance that eluded us," Edwin Torres, himself a Puerto Rican lawyer in New York City, told The New York Times. "It is beyond anybody’s imagination when I started that a Puerto Rican could ascend to that position, to the Supreme Court."

In Chicago, many Puerto Ricans called her confirmation their "Obama moment," with one music story owner telling the Chicago Tribune, "I need a poster of her. She’s a beautiful lady, the best."

Sotomayor’s humble beginnings in a Bronx housing project are already becoming the stuff of legend. Her father was a factory worker with a third grade education who died when she was 9. Her mother worked as a nurse to support Sonia and her younger brother, now a doctor. Without the advantages of money or connections Sotomayor, the valedictorian of her Catholic high school, managed to get into Princeton, where she graduated summa cum laude, then headed off to Yale Law School where she edited the law journal.

The message her story sends to the Puerto Rican community is simple: If she can do it, you can too.

"Whether it’s growing up in the Bronx, going to Catholic school or being from a single-parent household, there are so many tropes in her own story that we feel pride that someone from a background like ours achieved something so enormous," said Orlando Plaza, a Puerto Rican bar owner in East Harlem. "This is the real Jenny from the block." (Take that, J.Lo!)

Looks like Sotomayor is a wise Latina after all.

Photo courtesy of WhiteHouse.gov via Wikimedia Commons.