NEW YORK — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has said she wants to be called just “Sonia from the Bronx.”
And on Sunday, the first Hispanic justice on the nation’s highest court explained why, saying “you can’t come from the world I grew up in, the South Bronx, without feeling the frenzy of exile, constantly.”
She spoke at Cooper Union, a private college in Manhattan’s East Village where Abraham Lincoln once gave a speech against slavery.
The justice said she wasn’t “doing press” on an evening in her hometown that ended with hugs from some members of the audience who asked her to sign their copies of her memoir, “My Beloved World.” The best-selling book was published earlier this year with what she called Sunday “some baring of my own heart.”
She spoke on the closing night of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York City, which included her conversation with scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.
It was hardly a private event.
With a wry smile, Sotomayor said she recognized that “it seems pointless today to exclude the press from any event, when any member of the audience can tweet quotations.”
