Word: sotomayor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...great at creating catchy new lingo. Getting "Borked." "Hanging chads." "Lipsticks on pit bulls." The latest is "wise Latina," two words that have been repeated ad nauseam since the middle of May, when conservatives started flogging the text of a 2001 speech given by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor at the University of California, Berkeley. In that talk - on the subject of a Latino presence in the American judiciary - Sotomayor now famously said, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male...
...sure, the idea of a "wise Latina" is a new one to a lot of people. Before the Sotomayor speech was made available, finding the words wise Latina in articles of any sort was exceedingly rare. Latinas are frequently described as "fiery" or "caliente" or "curvy" - but rarely "wise." A cursory Nexis search reveals only a single book review, from 2000, of a sci-fi tome called The Fresco, in which a heroine who communes with aliens is described as the daughter of "a wise Latina lady and her salvage-yard husband." Clearly a page turner. (See Sonya Sotomayor...
...July 14 hearing, the nominee explained that "wise Latina" was her attempt to play off a quote by retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who said that "both men and women were equally capable of being wise and fair judges." Sotomayor said that "my play fell flat. It was bad." But Sotomayor is just trying to ameliorate her critics without having to make them look... unwise. She has nothing to apologize for - and neither have other politicians and judicial nominees who have said the same thing in their own words...
...what Sotomayor meant, we can look to that pop-cultural repository of Latino wisdom, Edward James Olmos. In the 1997 biopic Selena, there is an eye-rolling Latino Studies 101 moment in which Olmos, playing Selena's dad, talks about how difficult it is to ride the divide between Latino and American in the United States. "We gotta know about John Wayne and Pedro Infante," he huffs. "We gotta know about Frank Sinatra and Agustin Lara. We gotta know about Oprah and Cristina." Update: We gotta know about the Jonas Brothers and RBD. In other words, we gotta be wise...
Read "Inside the Moderately Liberal Mind of Sonia Sotomayor...