The Life Experiences That Made Justice Sonia Sotomayor the Badass She Is Today

Sonia Sotomayor was born in the South Bronx in New York City in 1954 to Puerto Rican parents Celina and Juan Luis, and she was raised in the projects by a single mother after her father died when she was only 9.

Sotomayor grew up with juvenile diabetes, and although she admitted she hid her disease in the past, she is now very open about her health. "Diabetes is really a fundamental part of me. It's part of my body; it's part of everything I do all day long, exercising, eating, stopping internally for a moment to check where my blood sugars are," she told NPR.

Sotomayor was valedictorian of her class in high school and then went on to graduate summa cum laude at Princeton University. There, she cofounded the Latino Student Organization and was cochairman of the Puerto Rican activist group Acción Puertorriqueña, which filed a complaint against the university's administration for discriminating against Puerto Ricans, charging the school with "an institutional pattern of discrimination."

Her mother, Celina, who was part of the Women's Auxiliary Corps during World War II, and worked hard as a nurse to give Sotomayor and her brother an education at a private Catholic school. She excelled in school and got a scholarship to study at Princeton University. "Each child has to have within them a desire to achieve something. For me, my initial goals were just to graduate from college because nobody in my family had done it," she told Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air.

On the day she was sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice by President Obama and now-President Joe Biden, Sotomayor said in an interview with NPR that her emotions were so strong she had to put them aside to survive. "The moment they smiled ... I had an out-of-body experience. It was as if my emotions were so big that if I continued to let them exist in my body, I would stop functioning."

When she was confirmed, Sotomayor was the member of the Supreme Court with
more federal judicial experience than any justice in 100 years, and had more overall judicial experience than anyone confirmed for the Court in the 70 years before her nomination.

In addition to her memoir and an illustrated book about her journey to the Supreme Court, Sotomayor also published Just Ask , a children's book encouraging kids to ask about other people's differences to understand and celebrate their uniqueness."Differences provide not just beauty in life, but they're important to the quality of the world we live in. It's richer because of our differences. We're not lesser because of it. We're stronger because of it," she told AP when she launched the book.