In 1970, the family found refuge by moving to Co-op City in the Northeast Bronx.Īs an activist, Sotomayor focused on faculty hiring and curriculum, since Princeton did not have a single full-time Latino professor nor any class on Latin American studies. Meanwhile, the Bronxdale Houses had fallen victim to increasing heroin use, crime, and the emergence of the Black Spades gang. At Cardinal Spellman, Sotomayor was on the forensics team and was elected to the student government. Sotomayor passed the entrance tests for and then attended Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. Although underage, Sotomayor worked at a local retail store and a hospital. For grammar school, Sotomayor attended Blessed Sacrament School in Soundview, where she was valedictorian and had a near-perfect attendance record. Despite the distance between the two, which became greater after her father's death and which was not fully reconciled until decades later, Sotomayor has credited her mother with being her "life inspiration".
Celina Sotomayor put great stress on the value of education she bought the Encyclopædia Britannica for her children, something unusual in the housing projects.