My Beloved World By Sonia Sotomayor

The United States is known as the “land of the free” attracting many immigrants to achieve the “American Dream” with the promise of equal opportunity for all. However, many groups, whose identities differed from the dominant American ideology, discovered this “American dream” to be a fantasy. In the 1960s, movements for civil rights in the United States of America included efforts to end private and public acts of racial discrimination against groups of disadvantaged people. Despite the efforts made to empower the disadvantaged groups, racialization and class differences prevailed leading to social inequality. The novel My Beloved World is an autobiography written by Sonia Sotomayor illustrating her early life, education, and career path, explaining

The backlash that Sotomayor experiences because of her decision to apply to and her acceptance into Princeton reveals how most Puerto Ricans experienced forms of racialization, or racial classification, by Caucasian Americans. Sotomayor experiences the culmination of years of racial discrimination and oppression when her school nurse asks with an “accusatory tone” and a “baleful gaze” how she got a “likely” and the “two top-ranking girls in the school only got a ‘possible’” (Sotomayor 102). She expects Sotomayor to experience “shame” under her gaze because her “perplexed discomfort” in answering her question is “clearly not enough” (102). The nurse demonstrates society’s common expectation for Puerto Rican and other minority students to not be at the same intellectual level as Caucasian Americans. Puerto Ricans are expected to not be capable of reaching higher education as they are historically thought of as inferior because of the dominant ideology of white supremacy. They are

Sotomayor represents the Puerto Rican students that have an awareness of being unqualified in comparison to their white classmates. Her “deficiency of...written English,” a representation for other Puerto Rican students, is because of being raised in a culturally different background than a common upper-class white student’s background (110). The “deficiency” symbolizes the common sense belief that being white, and writing and speaking fluently in English, is a classification of the prevalent culture. Sotomayor, in her dissent in Schuette v. BAMN, explicates that “discrimination against an individual occurs because [of] that individual’s membership in a particular group” revealing that a Puerto Rican’s identity as a Puerto Rican, as an immigrant, as a minority part of the lower class, racializes them, creating drawbacks that are arduous and can be impossible to overcome, as in the case of her cousin Nelson, who being just as smart as Sotomayor, is burdened with an addiction that restricts him from succeeding (Schuette 45; Sottomayor 106). In 1972, Princeton, a prestigious school, was dominantly populated by upper class white males, causing the culture and heritage of many Puerto Ricans and other minority students to clash with dominantly white, upper class