In the summer of 1959, Edwin Torres landed a $60-a-week job and wound up on the front page of El Diario. He had just been hired as the first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney in New York -- and probably, he thinks, the entire United States.
He still recalls the headline: "Exemplary Son of El Barrio Becomes Prosecutor."
"You would've thought I had been named attorney general," he said. "That's how big it was."
Fifty years later, the long and sometimes bittersweet history of Puerto Ricans in New York added a celebratory chapter yesterday as the Senate confirmed Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court. Her personal journey -- from a single-parent home in the South Bronx projects to the Ivy League and an impressive legal career -- has provoked a fierce pride in many other Puerto Ricans who glimpse reflections of their own struggles.
"This is about the acceptance that eluded us," said Torres, 78, who himself earned distinction as a jurist, novelist and raconteur. "It is beyond anybody's imagination when I started that a Puerto Rican could ascend to that position, to the Supreme Court."
Arguably the highest rung that any Puerto Rican has yet reached in this country, the nomination of Sotomayor is a watershed event for Puerto Rican New York. It builds on the achievements that others of her generation have made in business, politics, the arts and pop culture.
It extends the legacy of an earlier, lesser-known generation who created social-service and educational institutions that persist today, helping newcomers from Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
Yet the city has also been a place of heartbreak.
Though Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship in 1917 and large numbers of them arrived in New York in the 1950s, poverty and lack of opportunity still pockmark some of their neighborhoods.
A 2004 report by a Hispanic advocacy group showed that compared with other Hispanic groups nationwide, Puerto Ricans had the highest poverty rate, the lowest average family income and the highest unemployment rate for men.
In politics, the trailblazer Herman Badillo saw his career go from a series of heady firsts in the 1960s to frustration in the 1980s when his dreams of becoming the city's first Puerto Rican mayor were foiled by Harlem's political bosses.
Just four years ago, Fernando Ferrer was trounced in his bid against Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
All those setbacks lose their sting, if only for a moment, in the glow of Sotomayor's achievement, which many of her fellow Puerto Ricans say is as monumental for them as President Obama's victory was for black Americans.
It has affirmed a sense of Puerto Rican identity at a moment when that distinction is often obscured by such catch-all labels as Latino and Hispanic -- and even as it is subjected to negative comparisons.
"Many elite Latin Americans have implied that Puerto Ricans blew it, because we had citizenship and did nothing," said Lillian Jimenez, a documentary filmmaker who co-produced a series of TV ads in support of Sotomayor's nomination.
"But we were the biggest Spanish-speaking group in New York for decades, and bore the brunt of discrimination, especially in the 1950s," Jimenez said. "We struggled for our rights. We have people everywhere doing all kinds of things. But that history has not been known."
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