Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s newly released children’s book was inspired, she said, by her late mother Celina Báez Sotomayor’s ability to make “people feel good about themselves.”
After Baéz Sotomayor died of complications from cancer in 2021, people who attended her memorial services in New York, where she lived most of her life, and in Florida, where she retired, would tell Sotomayor the impact her mother, who worked as a nurse for many years, had in their lives.
“She was someone who woke up with a smile every day. She never complained, even when she was sick," Sotomayor told NBC News on Monday, which also marked the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month. "That act of giving to others, let the others feel not just important, but empowered to be themselves," she continued.
Sotomayor's "Just Shine! How To Be A Better You" is a collection of nearly a dozen beautifully illustrated vignettes featuring stories or instances from her mother's life — starting from when she was a little girl in Puerto Rico until she died at age 94 in Florida. Each one shows an example of the unspoken ways in which her mother showed her love to others. The book is published in English and also in Spanish.
One of the examples in the book focuses on her mother's relationship with Sotomayor's late cousin, Charlie. Sotomayor recalled how children would make fun of Charlie when he was a boy because he loved drawing and playing the piano and was not into sports. To let him know that his passion for art was valuable, her mother would take Charlie to museums and let him draw whenever he came to visit.
"It's a true story," Sotomayor said. "That's what my mother did. She made others feel important. That's hard to do."
The ways in which her mother showed her love to others made Sotomayor reflect about their own mother-daughter relationship.
"I don't want people to read this book and think that my relationship with my mom was always easy. Our relationship was something we fought to make better," Sotomayor told NBC News in Spanish. "In the last 30 years of my life, we really found each other."
In a conversation with TODAY on Monday, Sotomayor elaborated on how she and her mother worked to improve that relationship.
“I hope the book, when people read it, that they will see that I could go from half a life of tension with my mother — always love, but a lot of tension — to a book which pays tribute to all of her good things,” Sotomayor said. "Both sides need to understand that we need to practice forgiveness, and my mother and I figured that out.”
Sotomayor remembers her mother was not very affectionate toward her as a child. As an adult, one day Sotomayor asked her mother, "Why is it I don't remember being hugged by you as a child? She said, 'Sonia, who taught me to hug?' Because her mother died when she was 9 and her mother was sick from the day she was born." That's when Sotomayor realized the memories her mother had of parental love were not traditional.
In the book, readers get a glimpse into how Sotomayor's mother, Celina, showed love toward her sick mother — who would often wonder off, confused, in the middle of the night into the sugarcane fields of their Puerto Rican hometown.
"Celina would go out looking for her mother and gently guide her back to bed by the light of the moon," Sotomayor writes about her mother in the book. "Celina showed her love by gathering her courage to face the darkness."
When asked by NBC News how she applies her mother's lessons to her work as a Supreme Court Justice, Sotomayor said her mom's greatest lesson was when she told her, "Sonia, if you don't like something someone is doing, look for the best in them," she said.
"There are moments when the [Supreme Court] decisions are so infuriating," she said, "that tears come to my eyes — it's hard sometimes. But I understand and I try to understand, that they believe they're doing the right thing. I don't think so, I tell the world they're wrong, but I understand that they're doing it from values that are important to them."
Sotomayor also said she keeps not just professional relationships with the other eight justices, but friendships. "No two friendships are identical. People think friends should be certain things, but that's just not true," she said.
Sotomayor made history in 2009 when she became the first Hispanic to serve in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Still, Sotomayor said she views her work inspiring young people as her greatest legacy.
She has written three other children’s books and two versions of her memoir, one for adults and another for teens.
“Most people think that my written decisions will be my legacy. I don’t think they will," she said. "It is the young people like you who remember something I said or did and you have hope for yourself. That’s why I do this."
