Maggie's Farm

In the Summer of ’68, I stayed with a hot French girl in an apartment in Manhattan’s Spanish Harlem.  My Spanish was fluent enough then that I’d managed a store in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant, where many poor Puerto Ricans lived, Puerto Rican Spanish being something like playing a 45-record at 78-speed.

My second-most delight after things French that Summer was eating Puerto Rican stews at local, cheap eateries, the great Eddie Palmieri often playing in the background.  I prefer the meat-based ones to the seafood-based ones, but it’s the use of tropical vegetables and spices that make Puerto Rican stews so memorable that my mouth still waters.  (Bird Dog, please don’t look for a photo of Puerto Rican stew to add to the post; none look anything like what I’m talking about, appearing Americanized, and the recipes on the Internet don’t resonate.  I don’t want to mis-steer our readers.)

Years later, after a barefoot cruise deeper in the Caribbean I stopped off in Puerto Rico for a week, and was gratefully steered to a very busy neighborhood restaurant near Old San Juan reputed to have the best Puerto Rican stew.  Sitting at a long lunch counter along the right wall, the elderly lady on the next stool turned out to be the aunt of the fantastic Puerto Rican actor Raul Julia, politically active on the Left but an authentic superb professional.  She helped guide me to an afternoon of additional delectable tastings.

I’ve eaten at several Puerto Rican restaurants in the US outside NYC, and never have found those unique flavors.  I guess the ingredients don’t travel too well and the recipes are adjusted to Americans’ tastes (don’t even start me on how I’ve never found a pizza elsewhere to equal New York’s).

So, what does this have to do with Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, of Puerto Rican heritage?  My fondness for Puerto Rican food and music are far more authentic – indeed may I say honest -- than hers about her legal positions and speeches at her confirmation hearing.  Although the overwhelming Democrat majority in the Senate guarantees her a yea vote, and there’s no evidence of her “hiking” the Appalachian trail, Sotomayor is making a bad hash of the truth before the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Even the Associated Press leads its coverage with, “It’s a good thing Sonia Sotomayor speaks Sotomayoran,” as she baldly stirs false ingredients into her resume.

Sotomayor expects us to believe she didn’t really mean it when she repeatedly over the years said her “wise Latina” view of Justice should prevail over the clear law.  Sotomayor expects us to believe that although she headed the Litigation Committee of the Board of the Puerto Rican Legal and Education Defense Fund (PRLEDF), she “never reviewed those briefs” from the PRLEDF that argued radical positions before courts.

I can accept that Sotomayor is a liberal replacement for a liberal retiring Supreme Court Justice.  I can accept trying to defer to the selection of the sitting President.  I cannot accept that she is publicly making a hash of the truth knowing, as with her overturned Ricci decision, she is making a legal mockery of the facts.  Reasonably explaining yourself is one thing.  Putting rotten ersatz ingredients in the public’s stomach is another.  Puerto Rican stew is to be savored.  Her hash should to be spit out.

Also, check out PowerLine’s “Sotomayor’s Nose Grows Longer” , and the other posts at PowerLine on Sotomayor, and at the Washington Post Eva Rodriguez writes “I'm surprised and disturbed by how many times today Sonia Sotomayor has backed off of or provided less-than-convincing explanations for some of her more controversial speeches about the role of gender and ethnicity in judicial decision-making.”