Sotomayor Essay
0 General Document comments
0 Sentence and Paragraph comments
0 Image and Video comments
Sonia Sotomayor promotes a powerful message about cultural identity, using personal experiences and hot topic political ideas to justify herself in this passage. These ideas such as “the tension between the melting pot and the salad bowl” are especially notable in this setting, where Sonia was just an appeals-court judge speaking at the prestigious Berkeley School of Law, due to her future as a supreme court judge. Sonia really dives into her personal identity as a latina woman in this speech, and her personal examples of what she identifies with are strikingly powerful and relatable to how many of us identify ourselves. All of these rhetorical techniques and political viewpoints come together to give these Berkeley law students a real first-hand story of the American dream and Sonia’s cultural identity as a child of Puerto Rican born parents.
Sonia’s use of personal experiences to reflect her complicated identity is a strong rhetorical technique and gives the audience a peek into her moral and cultural identity. As she explains in the fourth paragraph, Sonia feels that no one thing can have enough impact to make someone identify with a culture. Instead, there must be a life full of experiences that are so important to you that the culture becomes an innate part of your life. Sonia describes some of her most treasured experiences she holds closest to her latina identity, such as her time spent with family as a child and the native Puerto-Rican cuisine she thoroughly enjoys. These experiences and the way they made her feel are why she identifies as latina, not just because her ancestors were people, “populated or colonized by Spain who maintained or adopted Spanish”. These personal experiences will always carry more weight than anything else in her latina identity.
On the other hand, Judge Sotomayor is aware of the United States struggle for a cultural identity, as she references how America insists, “that we can and must function and live in a race and color-blind way that ignores these very differences that in contexts we land”. Sonia is aware of how diversity can be powerful and beneficial to a society, and does not agree with ideas such as “color-blindness” that diminish cultural differences to things that should be ignored. She detests these claims powerfully towards the end of this passage, where she says, “I became a Latina by the way I love and the way I live my life”. This idea that we can choose or claim our identity based on the context of how we live is a triumphant slap in the face to the people who feel culture is only a political construct and has no impact on people’s lives. This passage gives the UC Berkeley students a powerful message to create your own individual culture where you thrive and are loved, instead of letting people around us box us in to the culture they best see fit for us.
General Document Comments 0
Let’s dive into this piece together and see how well it responds to the prompt by analyzing the rhetorical choices made by Sonia Sotomayor. First off, let’s consider how well the thesis is constructed. It seems your thesis centers around the idea that Sonia Sotomayor uses personal experiences and political ideas to convey a powerful message about cultural identity. This is a solid foundation for your analysis, as it sets up an exploration of how her personal narrative and political context intertwine to form her argument. Do you feel this thesis effectively captures the essence of Sotomayor’s rhetorical strategy? Want to see more about how the evidence supports this thesis?
on the uploaded document.
0 archived comments