Puerto Rican Identity and Culture Theme Analysis

Sotomayor’s Puerto Rican upbringing is a huge part of her identity, both in her personal life and in her work as a lawyer and, eventually, a judge. Both her parents and parts of their respective families immigrated to New York City (separately, but within weeks of each other) during World War II, and Sotomayor is thus raised in a tight-knit Puerto Rican extended family. Especially as Sotomayor recounts her childhood experiences, she remains acutely aware of how she and her family members embodied what it meant to be Puerto Rican—but also how they frequently flouted tradition as they made their lives in the city. As she gets older and especially as she gets involved with minority student groups at Princeton and Yale Law, Sotomayor begins to fit her Puerto Rican identity into a much larger framework of Puerto Rican history, the immigrant experience, and the issues Puerto Rico still faces about its own identity. Sotomayor allows that while being Puerto Rican may have provided unique hurdles along her journey, she insists that learning to think about her identity in a variety of different ways while also finding ways to take pride in who she is have been major contributors to her success.

In the first part of her memoir, when Sotomayor focuses on her childhood and particularly on life before Papi dies when she’s nine years old, Sotomayor describes her family’s Puerto Rican culture as tight-knit, fun-loving, and focused on food and quality time spent together. She describes in detail her Abuelita’s Saturday night parties—the delicious Puerto Rican food that Abuelita and all her aunties spend the day preparing for the parties, the cutthroat games of dominoes, and finally, Abuelita’s séances after the children are in bed. All of this paints a picture of pride in Sotomayor’s identity as a young Puerto Rican girl.

However, Sotomayor also notes that in a variety of ways, her nuclear family doesn’t embody several aspects of Puerto Rican culture. Her mother, Mami, works a nurse in the local hospital and is the only woman of her generation who works. Papi, meanwhile, struggles with alcoholism—which the entire family blames Mami for, due to the family’s overwhelming belief that women are always to blame for their husbands’ shortcomings. By taking note of the ways in which her nuclear family is seemingly less Puerto Rican (at least in the eyes of the rest of the family), Sotomayor learns at an early age that there isn’t one way to be Puerto Rican. This becomes even more apparent after Papi’s death, which heralds the end of Abuelita’s parties and sees Mami beginning to speak English rather than Spanish at home with her children. As times change—and as Mami sheds the burden of her husband—Mami, Sotomayor, and Junior embark on new ways to think of their identities.

As Sotomayor gets older and especially as she begins college, she begins to see her Puerto Rican roots in a more academic way rather than just thinking of it as a personal experience. Thus in college, when the opportunity arises, Sotomayor pushes for a class on Puerto Rican history. Having never studied Puerto Rican history, Sotomayor finds the class is eye-opening as she learns about its history of slavery, oppression, and mistreatment. However, because she grew up in a family where many members spent their youth in Puerto Rico, Sotomayor is able to put names and faces to the sorts of things she reads in her class materials. For instance, when she reads about women making pennies for hemming handkerchiefs, she thinks of her Titi Aurora and her stories—she was one of those women hemming handkerchiefs. All of this begins to help her understand that lived experience, history, and school aren’t at all separate. At school, a person can put their family history in context through what they learn and conversely, a person’s family history can influence what a person chooses to study. Later, in law school, Sotomayor takes this a step further when she writes a note for The Yale Law Journal on Puerto Rican maritime law. The note gives her the opportunity to look at Puerto Rico in yet another light—a legal one—and the interest and conversation it generates after publication impresses upon her that her identity is something to celebrate and own. This experience helps Sotomayor see that she can take pride in her identity professionally, not just personally and academically.

However, it’s nevertheless important to note that while Sotomayor may have had numerous opportunities to celebrate her identity professionally, academically, and within her family, she also experiences shocking incidents of racism and prejudice because she’s Puerto Rican. When she begins her first year at Princeton, affirmative action had only been in existence for a few years; no minority students accepted because of affirmative action have graduated yet. Occasionally, students, alumni, and school officials make her feel like minorities don’t belong because the government “forced” the school to accept them due to affirmative action, an attitude that Sotomayor encounters again and again over the course of her career. Despite this, Sotomayor remains firm in her insistence that minority students, professors, researchers, and employees in all fields are assets and belong—their differing experiences, upbringings, and backgrounds make the world a richer place. And most importantly, it’s essential to accept and celebrate one’s own identity if one wants to live a happy, fulfilled life, even if that identity is occasionally a hindrance.