SEVEN
The Wise Latina
Like most Americans of a certain age, Sonia Sotomayor remembers where she was on September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the United States. She had a physician’s appointment in midtown Manhattan, and like many New Yorkers, she made her way to safety through streets clogged with people and filled with smoke and ash. As she staggered to her home in Greenwich Village, she passed people with their car doors open, their radios relaying the latest news. She heard a report—false, it turned out—that a courthouse had been hit, and she worried that she had lost old colleagues.
Six weeks after 9/11, as the nation was still engulfed in the chaos and deaths of nearly three thousand people from the al-Qaeda hijackings, Sotomayor flew to California as previously scheduled. She had been invited to deliver the opening speech for a two-day symposium at the University of California, Berkeley, entitled “Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation.”
As one of the most prominent Latinas in the country at the time, U.S. appeals court judge Sotomayor was a natural choice for Latino organizers of the event, which would address such topics as “The Politics of Appointment” and “The Need to Increase the Role We Play as Lawyers, Judges, and Professors.” The conference also commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the first Latino appointment to the federal bench. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy had named Mexican American Reynaldo Guerra Garza, a University of Texas Law School graduate and Brownsville attorney, to be a U.S. district court judge in the Southern District of Texas. President Jimmy Carter elevated Garza to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 1979. A little over two decades later, in 2001, the number of Latinos on the federal bench was still disproportionately low compared with their population. At the same time, as civil rights and defense organizations pointed out, Latinos, like African Americans, were caught up in the criminal justice system in disproportionately high numbers.
Sotomayor’s speech at the conference on October 26 drew scant news attention in a nation still consumed by the devastation at the hands of al-Qaeda. But eight years later, her comments at Berkeley—one phrase relating to a “wise Latina,” in particular—would dominate commentary on her nomination to the Supreme Court.
Sotomayor gave the “wise Latina” speech without fanfare on a Friday afternoon in a standard state university auditorium, but critics charged that what she said was anything but ordinary. Her assertion: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” 1 Some detractors later called her “racist,” and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Georgia Republican, posited, “Imagine a judicial nominee said, ‘My experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman.’ Wouldn’t they have to withdraw?” 2
The “wise Latina” remark would take on a life of its own and elicit competing responses typifying the enduring reactions to Sotomayor. Ultimately, the remark would become a rallying cry for Hispanics. Sotomayor’s comments at this unguarded moment in Berkeley would also foreshadow chords she would strike after she became the most public justice ever. With candor and an everywoman style, she would separate herself from the usual elite world of the judiciary, emphasizing her disadvantaged background, her lingering feelings of being “different,” and a life of seized opportunities.
Sotomayor’s speech at Berkeley, given as the new president George W. Bush was nominating more conservative judges, offered a liberal counterpoint to the view that personal life experiences do not inform judicial decisions. In his election campaign, Bush had held up as a model Justice
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