Sotomayor - Ungrateful?

Sotomayor's Ungrateful Attitude


Sonia Sotomayor's parents were from Puerto Rico. She was born in the Bronx. She earned her undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1976. Below is a description of an event that occured while she was at Princeton as told to the Connecticut Hispanic Bar Association at a dinner in 1998:

My very first day signing up for classes I sat outside the gym next to a woman from
Alabama. I remember being intrigued by her very unusual and lovely accent. I began to perceive the depth of our differences when she began to describe her many family members and friends who had attended Princeton. As we sat there, Dolores, my roommate, and Theresa, a friend from Puerto Rico, approached, laughing, and as is sometimes our wont, talking very loudly. At that moment, my Alabamian classmate turned to me and told me, as she looked at the approaching Theresa and Dolores, how wonderful Princeton was that it had all these strange people who spoke these foreign languages. How ironic, here I thought she was the strange one with that lovely Southern accent I barely understood.

In case you didn't pick up on it, her roommate and Dolores were speaking Spanish, "and as is sometimes our wont, talking very loudly." I am from New York City, so I am used to Spanish speakers. Yes, Spanish speakers not sometimes, but often, speak Spanish very loudly amongst themselves. Many Americans find this offensive. If you come to the United States voluntarily, speak English or speak your own language quietly when you are in public. After the last great wave of immigration that ended in 1924, if immigrants spoke their native language to each other in public, they did so quietly. That is according to my mother, who was born in 1930. Let me say it frankly: The woman from Alabama reacted the way she did because she was offended. She probably wanted to tell those girls to speak English or shut up. Why? If you come to the United States because your place of origin is basically a failure, show some respect. Having lived in New York City for 22 years, I can recall only one time when I have ever heard any people from another immigrant group speaking their native language loudly.


But in order to understand the audacity and rudeness Sotomayor's statements above, we need to look at the history of the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States.

Puerto Rico was granted to the United States as part of the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War, that T.R. Roosevelt described as a "splendid little war." In the peace treaty signed on August 12, 1898, Spain ceded Cuba, the Philipinnes, and Puerto Rico the the United States. During the war, the United States had invaded Puerto Rico with 3,300 troops, but the combat had been inconclusive by the time the war ended. Is there any doubt how combat would have turned out if the United States had pushed the issue?

In 1917, the United States Congress passed the Jones-Shafroth Act. During the debate over the bill, Luis Muñoz Rivera, the Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner in Washington, argued in its favor, giving several significant speeches in the House of Representatives. On 5 May 1916 he demanded: "Give us now the field of experiment which we ask of you. . . . It is easy for us to set up a stable republican government with all possible guarantees for all possible interests. And afterwards, when you . . . give us our independence . . . you will stand before humanity as a great creator of new nationalities and a great liberator of oppressed people." (Wikipedia).

So the United States acquired Puerto Rico fair and square in a war that the United States won with minimal effort, and then out of the grace and goodness of its heart, at the request of the Puerto Rican representative, granted the jewel of U.S. citizenship to the people of Puerto Rico.

Sonia Sotomayor, the U.S. born child of Puerto Ricans, regarded the woman from Alabama, who had generations of her family as graduates of Princeton, as the one with the strange accent, and she was unwilling to budge from that assessment some 25 years later. The Alabaman spoke with a standard American regional accent. Sotomayor is the one who was ignorant of this accent and if Sotomayor has an accent, it is her accent that is strange, and foreign to this country. Puerto Rico is not legally a part of the United States, even though we did grant them citizenship.

It is this Alabaman's ancestors who were of the group that so easily won Puerto Rico through conquest and so generously granted the jewel of U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans.

Sotomayor has benefitted immeasurably from what the U.S. granted. Without the United States, Sonia Sotomayor might be a peasant laboring in Puerto Rico, or she might be a judge with little formal training presiding over a shack of a court in Puerto Rico.

Sotomayor's attitude should have been that she was honored to meet a descendant of the people who aquired her island with one hand and then, at the request of the island, so generously bequeathed an enormous benefit upon her people with the other. Sotomayor should have realized that she is the one who needs to learn about the southern accent, and that it is not strange; it is standard.

Not so. Sotomayor considered the southerner to be the strange one, and holds this position to this day.

I would say that if this is the attitude of Puerto Ricans, the U.S. should kick Puerto Rico loose. We never did give them their independence, as Munoz Rivera envisioned. They don't appreciate the bounty they have received due to the grace and generosity of the United States. Let's give them independence and they can wait in line to come here as immigrants if they want to come.