By BETTY BASTIDAS
For legal and social justice workers in the Mission District, the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina ever asked to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, is not just timely but long overdue.
“We as a community will have planted a very powerful seed for our future by having someone that powerful representing [us],” said Anamaria Loya, executive director at La Raza Centro Legal, a nonprofit community law center in the Mission District where 50 percent of the population is Latino.
“Having a judge at a high position who has an experience of being a woman of color, has experience being poor, would greatly benefit poor people,” she added.
The nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a daughter of Puerto Rican parents, was born and raised in a South Bronx housing project and went on to distinguish herself at Princeton as an undergraduate and Yale as a law student. Later, she worked in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and in private practice before being nominated to the Southern District Court of New York.
While Loya and others in the Mission District talked about the importance of Sotomayor’s nomination, they also stressed that sweeping legal changes in a country’s laws such as those made during the civil rights era come about through grassroots movements and individuals taking leadership to fight for change.
“The Mission District has to continue to be active, continue to build immigrant leadership, and continue to be a voice for progressive social justice,” Loya said.
For Loya and other social justice advocates, that work must continue whether or not Judge Sotomayor makes it through the Senate hearings.
Still, the significance in the possibility of the Supreme Court’s first Latina justice was not lost on Mission District leaders.
Carlos Villarreal, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild in San Francisco, said even though the Latino community has grown and developed significant leadership, “there is still a very intense struggle.”
In a time when immigration is such a contested issue, Villarreal said “we are at a crossroads” and the U. S. Supreme Court could redefine the rights of the country’s 12 million undocumented residents.
“In that sense,” he said, the appointment “is really timely and very critical.”
When asked why Latinos should care about the nomination, Loya acknowledged that it’s unlikely to make life better or worse for the immigrant selling tamales on the street. But she called the country’s legal system “powerful” and often protective of entrenched interests.
“It’s where the rules get made. The rules of this game called living in this country get made,” she said. “It’s that very legal system that legally labeled people as three-fifths human for a big part of our nation’s history. It has traditionally been a place to protect people with money and land.”
Loya said Sotomayor’s nomination was unique. “We don’t have the luxury of having dozens and dozens of Latinos being appointed to positions of power,” she said. “When it happens we get real excited and we really want to support the person.”
Loya said she felt good about Sotomayor. “She represents a voice on the court that we are thirsty for,” Loya said, but added that a fight was likely.
Already, she could see the opposition honing in on President Obama’s statement that he wanted to select someone with empathy as if “it’s a dirty word.”
But Loya hoped the democrats would prevail. “It would be really phenomenal, a historic thing for our country to have someone of her caliber with her life experiences on the court. It would be a brand new thing we’ve never experienced before.”
Out on the street, Mission resident Miguel Angel Hernandez agreed.
“Sotomayor is a point of support for the Hispanic race because one of our own is in position of great power,” he said. If given the chance, he said, Sotomayor will show she has the legal and intellectual capacity, and that the Latino community has virtues.