The New Agenda welcomes Monica, a graduate student who has volunteered to share what it means to her to have a minority female nominated as a Supreme Court Justice.  The opinions she expresses are her own, not necessarily those of The New Agenda.

Monica Jean Alaniz

When I first heard that Sonia Sotomayor had been nominated to the Supreme Court I have to admit that I got excited before knowing much about her. After all, here was a Latina being nominated to one of the highest judicial positions in the U.S. By just looking at her and knowing her name I already knew that I had more in common with her than the majority of individuals in the judicial system.

Am I a Latina?

Yes, so this means that I am a woman with a certain cultural history.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blindly support candidates for any type of political office just because of their race or gender, but as many of us know, the presence of minority women in high political offices is sorely lacking.

As an over-achieving teenager back in 1994 I participated in a summer academic program that took place in Washington D.C. I honestly didn’t think much about gender and race/ethnic issues at that age, but I do distinctly remember speaking to a high ranking member of the Democratic National Committee. I don’t remember this man’s name (again I was a high school student whose only brush with politics was the sordid local politics of my rural area of Texas, but that’s another story). As he spoke to us he insisted that there would be a female president during our lifetimes. I don’t know what prompted me to ask, but when the question and answer session of our meeting came up I raised my hand and inquired as to whether or not he believed we would ever see a minority female president in our lifetime. His straight-forward, perhaps honest answer was, “That’s never going to happen.”

Funny how that came to be one of the most memorable things I took away from me from that trip.

As different waves of feminism have rolled through our society, we have slowly begun to teach our daughters that they are can do anything that they set their minds to and that gender should not be an issue when it comes to achieving their goals, but I believe that many of us have ignored other obstacles to their moving forward. In this case I’m mainly speaking about ethnicity and race.

As a scholar of Chicana/o studies as well as feminist studies I remember some of the most interesting discussions in my gender studies classes centering on the racial/ethnic and gender hierarchy that exists in this country. Many times this hierarchy was described with white men at the top, the middle portion consisting of white females and minority males, and the bottom of the scale being made up of minority females. Of course we know that other factors come into play, such as sexual preference, geographic location, socioeconomic status, etc., but in all, being a minority woman usually means you have one more hurdle to clear.

I cannot fault Sotomayor for stating that her experience as a Hispanic woman comes into play with the decisions she makes. Our backgrounds frame ALL our decisions. As I read more about Sotomayor and learn more about her I find that I have more and more in common with her. Yes, we have our differences, but I think she would do a superb job on the bench, not least of which is encouraging women, and especially minority women, to achieve goals they didn’t think were possible.

I may not see a minority woman president in my lifetime, but I have very high hopes to see a minority woman Supreme Court Justice!