That is, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor’s family roots in Puerto Rico — and the island’s 19th century acquisition by the United States — call to mind New Mexico’s similar historical ties to the USA.  

As American history buffs know, Puerto Rico, known as la isla del encanto (the island of enchantment) and New Mexico, known as la tierra del encanto (the land of enchantment), were both Spanish speaking outposts that were annexed to a young United States in the 1800s.

UNM law professor Laura Gomez, who’s written about this history, notes that there are ”striking similarities” between 1846, the year New Mexico was ripped away from Mexico in the Mexican-American War and 1898, the year the United States took Puerto Rico following the Spanish-America War. Gomez’s recent book Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race takes up this comparison in more detail.

“I think the Americans learned something from New Mexico,” she told me recently. “I do think there are similarities in our historical experience as people originally colonized by the United States, as opposed to voluntary immigrants or as opposed to slaves.”

A related comparison to be made is that neither native Puerto Ricans or New Mexicans are or were “immigrants.”

Yet that’s what Obama seemed to imply when he announced the Sotomayor nomination, the judge poised to make history standing right next to him. From last week’s announcement:

Sonia’s parents came to New York from Puerto Rico during Second World War…

When Sonia was 9, her father passed away, and her mother worked six days a week as a nurse to provide for Sonia and her brother — who’s also here today, is a doctor, and a terrific success in his own right — but Sonia’s mom bought the only set of encyclopedias in the neighborhood, sent her children to a Catholic school called Cardinal Spellman, out of the belief that with a good education here in America all things are possible.

“Here in America”? But Puerto Rico is part of America, its people  native-born American citizens from birth.

Just like New Mexicans, of course, in spite of the occasional ignorance that assumes the Land of Enchantment is really part of Mexico.

There’s a reason New Mexico license plates include the letters “USA” in bold type just so everyone’s clear.

From Catholic schools in New York, to Princeton — where she graduated at the top of her class — to Yale Law School, where she was editor of the law journal, Sonia Sotomayor was the classic overachiever.

Neither did she let up afterwards: big city prosecutor, corporate litigator, federal trial judge appointed by a Republican president, appellate court judge appointed by a Democratic president.

And all those achievements were grounded in humble origins in the south Bronx, where the daughter of Puerto Rican parents was at home flipping through the pages of the shiny encyclopedias her mother insisted she had.

At first glance, Sotomayor’s story might seem far removed from New Mexico.

But it’s a storyline native New Mexican and University of New Mexico law professor Margaret Montoya also knows well.

“As a kid in Las Vegas, my brother and my sister and I worked hard to learn. My mom and dad really pushed us on this,” Montoya tells NMI. “It was a real measure of them that we were a high achieving family.”

Montoya went from the small northern New Mexico town to San Diego State University, and then Harvard Law School, where she was the first Hispanic woman to be admitted.

“I think I understand the nature of the dedication it took her,” Montoya says of Sotomayor. “A lot of times it meant not doing a lot of things that the other people were doing. I wasn’t partying. I was a book worm.”

Like Sotomayor, Montoya also worked in corporate law and has been a UNM law professor for the past 17 years.

Montoya, who has met Sotomayor on more than one occasion but says she doesn’t know her personally, adds that “there was this expectation that went back to my grandparents about being readers and being attentive to grammar and about speaking well, whether you were speaking English or Spanish.”

The drive to achieve isn’t the only value Sotomayor’s south Bronx — New Yorican, as she has put it — culturally-infused story has in common with New Mexicans like Montoya.

Albuquerque native Laura Gomez, also a member of the UNM law school faculty, is a decade younger than Sotomayor and also an Ivy League alum.

“Those places are so closed and so hard,” Gomez explains, reflecting on the challenges Sotomayor must have faced.

“I knew a lot of Puerto Ricans (as an undergraduate at Harvard) and I know how much harder it was 10 years earlier, the class isolation she would have felt,” she said. “To me, it makes her accomplishments that much more.”

Gomez would go on to earn a law degree, as well as a masters and PhD in sociology, from Stanford University. Just this past weekend, she was elected president of the Law and Society Association, a prestigious scholarly organization. Gomez mentions that she’s the association’s first woman of color president.

Yet big differences between Sotomayor’s New York upbringing and those of New Mexico’s Latina lawyers are also notable.

Montoya, who has spent the fall 2009 semester teaching at the City University of New York School of Law (and was its commencement speaker last month), points to social mobility in New Mexico for Hispanics — and its absence elsewhere.

“I think a Puerto Rican girl growing up in the south Bronx looks around and sees a New York City that is largely immigrant, that is largely people of color and yet it is a power structure that is almost completely white,” she said. “I think that a young Latina in the Bronx is really swimming upstream even today.”

Referring to New Mexico’s many powerful Hispanic politicians and successful professionals of all sorts, Montoya credits “an infrastructure for social mobility that, after all, goes back centuries.”

Bernalillo County’s newest Metropolitian Court judge, Briana Zamora, points to an example that’s very close to home.

“Our judiciary here is very diverse,” Zamora says. “We’re lucky in New Mexico. And the nice thing about my court is it’s predominately women.”

Thirteen of the judges on the 19-judge metro court are female, she points out.

“When I came to the court there were quite a few Hispanic women, so I didn’t feel different in any way because we’re actually the majority.”

Zamora also notes that the New Mexico Supreme Court currently has a Latina justice, Petra Maez, its first.

Meanwhile, there are local voices who say Sotomayor would not be the nation’s first Hispanic justice.

In an e-mail to NMI, Albuquerque Journal columnist and attorney Jim Scarantino argues that Benjamin Cardozo deserves that accolade.

Of Cardozo, who served on the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1930s, Scarantino writes:

I do want to point out she is not the first Hispanic nominated to the Supreme Court. One of the greatest jurists in American history was Hispanic, Benjamin Cardozo. He grew up attending Spanish-Portuguese clubs. Portuguese background qualifies him for ‘Hispanic’ under federal law … I hope being Jewish doesn’t un-Hispanic him.

“I just think that’s the most ridiculous thing,” Gomez counters. “(Hispanic) was a meaningless category at the time. For his reality, it had no significance,” she says.

“The term ‘Hispanic’ arises in the (19)80s getting traction as a concept, as a pan-ethnic term to refer to all Spanish-speaking people, Mexicans, Cubans, others,” Gomez adds.

Gomez’s Harvard undergraduate thesis explored the origins and strategic use of the term ‘Hispanic’ by politicians like then-U.S. Rep. Bill Richardson and ex-Gov. Toney Anaya.

But if Sotomayor has encountered ugly prejudice over the course of her life, she probably does have something in common with Cardozo.

“I think Cardozo as a Jew in his time, he did deal with anti-Semitism that was significant,” Gomez says. “There were law firms that didn’t hire Jews, There were law schools that didn’t admit Jews.”

But beyond the “Cardozo controversy,” it seems clear that Hispanic identity is a much stronger concept today. Even if it’s something of a clunky concept.

That’s what Doña Ana County District Attorney Susana Martinez thinks.

“Often in America we tend to use the common term ‘Hispanic,’ which in fact lumps many ethnic backgrounds together,” the 20-year veteran GOP prosecutor says.

But, even while she says she’s still learning about Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, she adds, “the pride is there.” And that’s the case even though Martinez is a Mexican American while Sotomayor is New Yorican.

Gomez seconds that motion.

“We’re totally excited about her, and that suggests that the idea of the pan-ethnic Hispanic identity has become meaningful in the last 30 years. We as Mexican Americans feel as connected to her as the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother,” she says. “That’s interesting. I think we should as Mexican Americans feel tremendously connected to her.”

And in Sonia Sotomayor, many Americans — and not just Latinos — see connections in the quintessential American story of her life’s journey.

Put newly-minted Bernalillo County Metro Court Judge Zamora in that category.

“Even though she’s just one Hispanic woman on the bench, I still think she’s a role model for all of us, that if we really set our minds to something, the doors are open.”

Photo by Jay Tamboll/Flickr

ALBUQUERQUE — University of New Mexico law professor Laura Gomez remembers the exact time last Tuesday she heard the news that President Obama had nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“My alarm went off right at 7 a.m. and NPR was announcing that she was about to be appointed,” Gomez recalls. “I couldn’t believe it was really happening. I was really thrilled.”

Gomez, an Albuquerque native who attended Harvard as an undergraduate and then Stanford for both a law degree and a doctorate in sociology, says she expected Obama to select someone else even as she hoped Sotomayor would get the nod.

“Obviously I knew that was a possibility,” she adds. “I guess I was surprised.”

Meanwhile, Briana Zamora, Bernalillo County’s newest Metropolitan Court judge, awoke similarly last Tuesday.

“The morning I heard the news, it almost brought me to tears. I was overjoyed to say the least,” Zamora says.

It’s unlikely that such reactions to the first-ever Latino nominee to the Supreme Court are uncommon in New Mexico, the state with the nation’s largest Hispanic population at more than 44 percent. But neither are they universal.

Doña Ana County District Attorney Susana Martinez, a Republican, reacted much more coolly.

“I wasn’t giddy,” the veteran prosecutor says. “I went, ‘Oh, OK. Now let’s figure out who this lady is.”

As the spotlight focuses on the trailblazing Sotomayor and her record, including 17 years as a federal judge in New York, a range of contentious issues revolving around ethnicity and gender — from interpreting the law to identity, and, of course, politics — all seem poised to play a large role in Sotomayor’s confirmation process.

The fact that the nation’s first African-American president picked Sotomayor is revealing, according to UNM law professor Margaret Montoya.

“I didn’t think Obama was going to take the risk of appointing her because she is a risky appointment,” Montoya explains. “It is going to cause him some trouble, and I think it forces him to go to a certain location that he’s not particularly comfortable — the role race has played in his own assertion to power.”

Even so, Montoya sees Sotomayor’s open embrace of her roots — the daughter of Puerto Rican parents who grew up in a Bronx public housing project — as a strength that is easily misunderstood by critics.

“I think she’s very good at explaining that background doesn’t determine the outcome; background informs the kinds of choices a judge makes about what facts are important,” Montoya, a 1978 graduate of Harvard Law School, explains.

“Because I think that in law when we are telling the story of the dispute, how facts are heard necessarily resonate within the lives that we’ve lived. I don’t think that’s identity politics. I think that’s the way our minds work, the way we sort information.”

Much has been made of a 2001 speech Sotomayor gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in which she stated that personal biography does in fact play a role in decision making and concluded that “our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”

While that might be controversial in some circles, Zamora, 35 and a graduate of UNM’s school of law, doesn’t think it is.

“That’s easy,” she beings. “Obviously, because our backgrounds and our ethnicity and our gender play a role in how we are as a judge, it doesn’t mean we’re not going to follow the law. At the same time, that’s why we bring diversity to the bench.”

Rebutting the suggestion from some that Sotomayor is an “affirmative action” pick or lacking “the right intellect,” Gomez sees political pitfalls for Republican opponents of the nomination if they pursue that line of attack against the Princeton- and Yale-educated Sotomayor.

“On one level, it’s funny because it’s so outrageous,” Gomez says, noting that  Sotomayor not only attended elite institutions of higher learning, but she thrived there graduating at the top of her class. “I think it may end up doing tremendous damage to the Republicans.”

Martinez, the Republican prosecutor often touted as a potential statewide candidate for higher office, acknowledges that GOP opposition to Sotomayor must be “artful” and rooted in “concrete examples.” Even so, she offers her own measured critique of leaning on gender or ethnicity.

“I think your upbringings and cultural background brings perspective to everyday life,” she says, “but when you talk about the law it has to be applied in an objective, fair manner, not in an objective Hispanic female manner.”

Legal disputes must be adjudicated as impartially as possible, Martinez adds.

“It’s either in the law or it isn’t. It’s either in the facts or it isn’t,” she says. “A Supreme Court decision has to be a decision based on law, not on emotion.”

Others, like Montoya, don’t see the work of a judge the same way and say they look forward to the coming debate over Sotomayor’s views and past writings.

“She’s talking about a certain mental process that is connected to identity. a mental process about choices that judges make,” Montoya says. “I’m extremely excited that we’re going to have a national conversation about why biography matters, and how biography intersects with history, about how biography is a story that is the memory of a family and a community.”