CHAPTER ONEDEEP ROOTS
“Everything about my culture has given me enormous education and joy.”
—SONIA SOTOMAYOR
On June 4, 2010, fifty-five-year-old Sonia Sotomayor paid a visit to her childhood home. She had spent twelve years of her life in the Bronxdale Houses—a public housing complex in the Bronx borough of New York City that consists of nearly fifteen hundred apartments across twenty-eight buildings. Those project walls had seen her smiles and tears, her dreams and struggles.
This was no ordinary visit. Less than a year earlier, Sonia had broken barriers when she became the first United States Supreme Court justice of Hispanic descent. The Supreme Court is the highest court in the country, and to be appointed to it is a dream that many judges have—yet only a handful have achieved.
Traveling from the capital city of Washington, DC, where she worked, Sonia had returned to the Bronxdale Houses to make history again. The housing complex, which was home to many Hispanic families like her own, would soon have a new name: the Justice Sonia Sotomayor Houses and Community Center. For the first time, the New York City Housing Authority would rename one of its 335 properties in honor of a former resident who was still alive. This was a tremendous honor, and it showed how much the achievements of Sonia—a native New Yorker and the daughter of Puerto Rican migrants—meant, not only to the diverse Latinx residents of those houses but to the entire city of New York.
The renaming of the housing complex had been a true community effort. Residents of the Bronxdale Houses, housing activists, and local government officials had worked together to create a petition and gotten enough signatures to make the name change happen. Many of them—more than three hundred people in total—had now gathered for the renaming ceremony to welcome Sonia home. Shining bright in a red blazer, Sonia walked onto the stage to make her remarks as the people in the audience watched her with admiration, pride, and hope for what the future might hold for them, their children, and their grandchildren. These same walls also saw their smiles and tears, their own dreams and struggles. If Sonia could grow up in this housing project and later make history, what wonderful things might they and their descendants accomplish?
At the podium, Sonia fought back tears as she recalled “the hours and hours of laughter that my cousins and I had as we roamed the grounds of this housing project, and played in the playgrounds, and screamed and fought and laughed and lived.”
She also highlighted the role that the Latinx community of the South Bronx had played in her life. “I am deeply humbled and touched that these houses will now bear my name, and I am so grateful for all they have given me in my life,” Sonia said. “The members of that community sustained each other and helped the next generation to grow. It is important for the broader community to remain committed to assisting the residents of this place so that other little Sonias will reach their dreams.”
Sonia was certainly doing her part. During the ceremony, she danced alongside the youth choir from her alma mater Cardinal Spellman High School as its members belted out a gospel song called “Be Thankful.” Later that day, Sonia also met with students at her former elementary school, Blessed Sacrament, and addressed the graduating class of Hostos Community College, where her proud Puerto Rican mother had studied nursing. Each stop on her itinerary was a reminder of how deep Sonia’s Bronx roots ran and how much her community there meant to her.
Yet Sonia’s story began unfolding many years before her birth, in a place more than sixteen hundred miles away.
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Puerto Rico is an archipelago—a cluster of islands—that lies in the Caribbean Sea. It consists of a main island, four smaller islands, and hundreds of tiny landmasses called cays and islets. Puerto Rico is part of a larger group of islands known as the West Indies that also includes Cuba and the island of Hispaniola, which today is shared by two countries, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
The Spanish words Puerto Rico translate to “rich port” in English. But the island’s indigenous people, the Taíno, had their own name for their homeland in their Arawak language: Borikén. That is why, to this day, you will often hear Puerto Ricans refer to Puerto Rico as “Borinquen” or call themselves “Boricuas.” The Taíno civilizations of Puerto Rico and the other Caribbean islands trace their roots to indigenous peoples who lived along the Orinoco River in South America (in what is now Venezuela), and long before the arrival of any Europeans such as Christopher Columbus, they had migrated by water to the islands of the Caribbean Sea over the course of thousands of years.
For centuries, the Taíno cultures of the Caribbean islands flourished. The Taíno of Borikén were skilled fishermen and farmers. They grew vegetables like yucca, beans, sweet potatoes, and other crops. The Taíno were also artists who made beautiful pottery and wood carvings and elaborate belts that they decorated with shells. A ball game played with a rubber ball was also part of the Taíno way of life. Today, Taíno culture continues to be an important part of Puerto Rican identity, and its influence is evident in English and Spanish words that have roots in the Arawak language.
EXAMPLES OF ENGLISH WORDS INSPIRED BY ARAWAK
But the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in the late fifteenth century shattered the world of the Taíno. Working for the king of Spain, the colonizers enslaved the Taíno of Borikén and the other islands in the West Indies. Because the colonizers introduced diseases like smallpox, typhus, and measles into their communities, the number of Taíno people on the island dwindled. Today, there are vaccines that can protect us against these serious diseases, but for the Taíno, these illnesses proved deadly.
For three hundred years, Spain squeezed all the wealth it could from Puerto Rico—gold, as well as agricultural products like sugarcane, cotton, and coffee. The Spanish government showed no concern for the welfare of the island’s natural resources or the people who lived there. In fact, the Spanish also captured and enslaved people from Africa and forced them to work in gold mines or on big farms called plantations.
In 1868, parts of the Puerto Rican population, including enslaved Africans, rebelled against Spain’s oppression in what is known as the Grito de Lares (Cry of Lares). While the rebellion failed to achieve independence from the Spanish colonizers, over time Puerto Rico succeeded in gaining more freedoms, including the end of slavery in 1873—almost a decade after it was outlawed in the United States in 1865.
Though the first Africans had arrived in Puerto Rico against their will, they and their descendants have played important roles in the economic and political development of Puerto Rico and continue to add to the richness of its culture, from food to sports to the arts and everything in between. For example, popular dishes such as mofongo (made of mashed plantains and combined with chicken, steak, pork, or seafood) and bacalaitos (codfish fritters) hail from West and Central Africa, as does the musical tradition called bomba y plena.
Spanish control of Puerto Rico lasted until 1898. That year, the United States defeated Spain in a conflict known as the Spanish-American War. The war erupted after a US Navy ship called the USS Maine that was docked in Havana, Cuba, exploded and sank in February 1898. The USS Maine was stationed in the Cuban capital to protect American citizens in Cuba at a time when the Cuban people were revolting against Spain to gain their independence. Most of the crew onboard were killed.
At the time the cause of the explosion was not clear, but because the United States supported the Cuban revolt for independence, influential US newspapers immediately blamed the tragedy on Spain, paving the way for war. (Experts now believe the explosion was probably an accident.) After losing the war, Spain agreed to give up Puerto Rico and two of its other colonies—the Philippine Islands in Southeast Asia and the island of Guam, located in the western Pacific Ocean—to the United States in an agreement known as the Treaty of Paris of 1898. (Meanwhile, Cuba succeeded in gaining its independence from Spain.)
Since the Treaty of Paris, the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico has remained confusing and complicated. In 1917 Puerto Rico became a US territory, and Congress passed a law called the Jones-Shafroth Act that recognized Puerto Ricans as US citizens. But the people of Puerto Rico have still been denied the right to vote in US national elections, and to this day they do not have voting representatives in Congress like American citizens who live in each of the fifty states do.
At one point, the United States also tried to “Americanize” Puerto Rico, in part by making children in Puerto Rican public schools take all their classes in English. But the people of Puerto Rico resisted this change and eventually kept Spanish as the language of learning in their schools, with English taught as a separate subject.
In 1952 Puerto Rico’s status changed yet again. This time, it became a US commonwealth. This new status gave the local Puerto Rican government more control over running the island than it had had as a colony.
THE US–PUERTO RICO RELATIONSHIP
The top elected official in Puerto Rico is the governor. In the early years after Puerto Rico came under US rule in 1898, this governor was appointed by the president of the United States. As a result, the first twenty-two governors of Puerto Rico were not native to the island and had no personal relationship to its people. In fact, the first Puerto Rican native to serve as governor of Puerto Rico was Jesús T. Piñero, who was appointed in 1946.
But Puerto Ricans demanded the right to elect their governor, just like Americans in the fifty states elect their own local, state, and federal representatives. And so, in 1947, US Congress passed a law allowing them to do so. The following year, Luis Muñoz Marín became the first Puerto Rican governor elected by the people of Puerto Rico.
Marín had once called for Puerto Rico to become an independent country. Instead, it was under his term as governor that Puerto Rico became a US commonwealth. As a commonwealth, Puerto Rico can pass some laws of its own. However, even though Puerto Ricans cannot vote in national elections and have no representation in Congress, the people of the island are still obligated to follow US federal law and pay some federal taxes.
Under Spanish rule, poverty was everywhere in Puerto Rico, and it grew worse when the United States took over. At that time, many people in Puerto Rico survived by growing sugar, but under US rule, corporations took over the production of sugar from local landowners. Unable to make money off the land, a large number of Puerto Ricans needed to find jobs instead, but there were not enough of them. As a result, Puerto Rico fell into an even deeper economic depression, and many Puerto Ricans were left with no choice but to look for employment opportunities elsewhere.
After they were recognized as US citizens in 1917, Puerto Ricans were free to move to the continental United States. As a result, in the 1940s and ’50s, tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans left their homeland. The vast majority of them headed to New York City. A large number of these Puerto Rican migrants found homes in the northern part of the borough of Manhattan—so many, in fact, that the neighborhood soon became known as Spanish Harlem. Other Puerto Ricans settled across the Harlem River, in the Bronx, the city’s northernmost borough. Though hundreds of miles away from their tropical island, these new Puerto Rican arrivals built a strong community and made New York their home.
Among the many Puerto Ricans who made the journey north in search of work during this time was a young man named Juan Luis Sotomayor. Juan Luis arrived in New York City by ship in 1944 during World War II, a global conflict being waged across Europe, Asia, and Africa. Juan Luis made the trip with his mother, Mercedes, stepfather, and brothers and sisters. He found a job at a mannequin factory. And, like other Puerto Rican migrants who came to New York City, Juan Luis and his family found housing in tenement apartments on Kelly Street in the South Bronx. He was happy with his job, but eventually that mannequin factory closed, so he took another job at a different factory that made radiators.
Juan Luis met Celina Báez at a party in the Bronx. Like him Celina was a young woman who had arrived in New York City from Puerto Rico in 1944 in search of new opportunities. Unlike Juan Luis, however, she came to the United States alone, leaving her family behind on the island. As World War II raged, the US Army recruited women to fill a variety of desk jobs that men left behind to go fight on the front lines. Celina joined the Women’s Army Corps, and after she completed her training, the army sent her to New York City, where she worked in a post office, sorting mail and packages destined for American troops who were stationed in Europe.
Juan Luis and Celina fell in love. And she made it known that she was not planning on returning to Puerto Rico when her military service was over. So when Juan Luis asked her to stay in New York and be his wife, Celina accepted his proposal. The pair exchanged their vows at city hall in a small ceremony, and Celina moved into the apartment on Kelly Street with Juan Luis and his family.
Even after she was married, Celina wanted to continue her education. During the first year of their marriage, Juan Luis worked at the factory to make money and support the couple while Celina studied to earn her high school degree. After that she studied to become a practical nurse—a nurse whose job is to provide basic care for hospital patients and help keep them comfortable. Then on June 25, 1954, Juan Luis and Celina Sotomayor became parents and welcomed their first child, a daughter they named Sonia Maria.
Sonia was an energetic child who started speaking and walking when she was just seven months old. She quickly developed a reputation for being mischievous, and her family gave her the nickname Ají, which means “hot pepper” in Spanish. By the time Sonia was born, her parents had moved into their own apartment in the same building where Juan Luis’s family lived. The tenement where she grew up may have been crowded, dark, and narrow with small rooms, but Sonia spent the early years of her life surrounded by her extended family, including Mercedes, her beloved abuelita. One of her cousins, Nelson, became her favorite playmate, and they spent hours together pretending to be knights, jousting in a medieval arena.
Spanish was the primary language spoken in the Sotomayor home, and most of Sonia’s relatives spoke very little English. In fact, when Sonia was a kid, Spanish was everywhere. In the years since her parents had come to New York City, the Puerto Rican population in the Bronx had swelled. In 1953, the year before Sonia was born, migration from Puerto Rico reached its highest point with sixty-nine thousand Puerto Ricans leaving the island for the states.
When Sonia was three years old, her immediate family—which by then included Sonia’s newborn brother, Juan Luis Sotomayor Jr., or “Junior”—moved to a new home. Their destination was a newly built public housing complex in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx that was owned and operated by New York City. It was called the Bronxdale Houses, and it was a ten-minute drive from Kelly Street, on the other side of the Bronx River. The move was Celina’s idea; always striving to give her family the best, she was convinced that her children would have a better life in the new projects, which were brighter and cleaner than the old tenements.
Even after they moved away from Kelly Street, Sonia remained very close to Abuelita Mercedes, who loved to throw family parties on Saturday nights. Sonia looked forward to these parties. On Saturday mornings, Sonia usually went shopping with her grandmother on Southern Boulevard to buy all the ingredients—chicken, tomatoes, onions, and plátanos verdes (green plantains)—that Mercedes needed to whip up into a big Puerto Rican feast for her children and grandchildren. Arroz (rice), gandules (pigeon peas), and pernil (pork) were often on the menu. The dishes all started with sofrito, a potent sauce made with vegetables and an herb called recao. Years later, in her autobiography My Beloved World, Sonia would recall the whir of the blender as her grandmother and her aunts whipped up batches of sofrito in that Bronx kitchen.
On those Saturday evenings, while the adults played dominoes and listened to Puerto Rican music and her grandmother recited poetry deep into the night, Sonia played with Nelson and her other cousins. After the party, Sonia slept over at Abuelita’s house. On Sunday morning, she would wake up to the aroma of homemade pancakes. “My Latina soul was nourished as I visited and played at my grandmother’s house with my cousins and extended family,” Sonia would later say in a speech. “They were my friends as I grew up.”
As a child, Sonia was also very connected to her Puerto Rican roots. From the time Sonia was a toddler, she and Abuelita Mercedes would hop on a plane and visit the island. Sonia savored traditional Puerto Rican desserts like tembleque (a coconut gelatin) and fresh fruit like guava and mango during the day, then drifted off to sleep while listening to the soothing song of the coquí—the small frogs native to Puerto Rico that are considered a symbol of the island.
Eventually Sonia’s mother, Celina, took Sonia and Junior on vacations to the island to visit her family. When they landed at the airport in the capital San Juan, the first thing they did was drink the quenching water of the fresh green coconuts that vendors sold along the roads. Sonia then had the vendor cut up the coconut so she could eat the creamy white flesh, too.
One of Sonia’s favorite places on the island was the bakery run by her mother’s brother Tío Mayo, who sold bread, pastries, and sweet, sticky guava jam. When not at her tío’s bakery, she went to Luquillo Beach to dip her toes in the ocean. While she and her family often visited Orchard Beach in the Bronx—which was so popular with Puerto Ricans who had settled in New York that it became known as the “Puerto Rican Riviera”—Luquillo Beach was so different with its warm, clear waters, and fine, white sand.
In Puerto Rico, Sonia also loved to spend time looking at the works of art at the Museo de Arte de Ponce on the island’s southern coast. For a young girl from an inner-city neighborhood, la Isla del Encanto (the Island of Enchantment), as Puerto Rico is known, was filled with wonders.
Copyright © 2023 by We Are All Human Foundation
