May 29, 2009

Sotomayor!! Sotomayor!!

Gosh, guys, it's been forever! I'm sorry! I had the craziest semester ever, I really did, but hopefully now I'll have a chance to post a couple things in here every once in a while (I don't want to be overly ambitious). Also I'm planning my next trip to the island so posting will get more and more frequent as I get more and more excited--I haven't been in nearly a year and the wait is already unbearable!

Anyways, I'm sure we've all heard quite a bit now on Sotomayor, some of it disturbing, and some really inspiring. I don't feel a need to link to most of it but I did find it cute that it caused Slate to put up an essay titled "Why are we in Puerto Rico?" I don't think I entirely agree with some of his history "facts", but it's pretty interesting that Sotomayor apparently supported secession, at least back in her undergrad days. I doubt though that anyone will hold that against her now, unlike some of her rulings.

We'll see how that turns out soon enough, I suppose.

1 comment:

Neffers said...

After reading your warning about the historical "facts" I was afraid of the article. But it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

Although I appreciate the way that she holds on to her Puerto Rican identity, the US celebrating the first Hispanic in the Supreme Court in the 21st century is as ridiculous as celebrating their first black president...

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad for both of them and it's about damn time the US behaved like they were not in the 19th century.

My fear, just as when Sila became PR's fist woman governor, is that as soon as one of them makes a mistake, or even does nothing bad but nothing good, they will blame it on the fact of their "condition" : black, woman, hispanic...


On another note, I find it weird how now, they're trying to understand the word Hispanic. A NYT article linked from that slate article ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/us/27hispanic.html?_r=1 ) makes me wonder even more about all the different ways Hispanic and Latin cultures have been referred to.

To me, Hispanic is Spanish Speaking, from Europe and the Americas. Latin is speakers from the different Latin "dialects" (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, etc). Adding the American at the end would just specify that it's referring to those in the New World. Maybe I'm wrong and not accounting about the fluidity and amorphous nature of language and how one word will easily stop meaning one thing, almost like the use of permisologia (the science of permits?? come on people...)

I must stop now before I go on the rant of permits in Puerto Rico