Unresolved Contradictions In Sonia Sotomayor's My Beloved World

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Ever since the United States was established on the principles stated in our founding documents, it has been a herculean task of our justice system, as well as individuals in history, to ensure that these promises were maintained for all. In Sonia Sotomayor’s autobiography “My Beloved World” she gives us a glimpse of the difficulties of being a lower class Puerto Rican women attending Princeton University, therefore demonstrating the promise that was not kept by the Constitution in ensuring equal opportunity for all. The text shows us how certain groups are deprived from equal opportunity and how it affects their daily treatment and their chances at getting accepted to colleges. The unresolved contradictions questioned ideologies present today express a difference in what was promised and what was given, those which not only apply to the category of race as King emphasized, but also to class, gender and religion. In Sonia Sotomayor’s autobiography, the text reveals the unresolved contradictions of American history through the continuity of mistreatment to racial minority groups due to racialization, class formation and gender formation, ultimately preventing them from achieving this nonexistent American Dream and Melting Pot theory.
The American dream is a set of ideals embedded in American society which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success and an upward social mobility achieved through hard work, but is contradicted by the different treatment low income students may encounter. This idea was first officially presented in the Declaration of Independence of 1776, where it stated, “that all men are created equal, that all men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are li...

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...been racialized to maintain white supremacy and how they ignored until something out of the ordinary happens. The Bracero program may have played a part into the nurses accusatory tone because the Mexicans were only seen as manual labor to Americans in the 1940’s, so embedded into societies mind are still that Latino groups are only valuable to work low class labor jobs, not having a chance to climb up the hierarchy ladder by going to Ivy League schools. Her identity as an immigrant ultimately transcends all other identities at play, and makes her out to be unqualified for certain things in society. Sotomayor tries to prove her value by pursuing higher education at Princeton, but is labeled strictly as an “affirmative action” student who was able to gain access to the institution easier by being a racial group that has been historically excluded or discriminated.

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