2021 Governor’s Award Recipient Sonia Nieto Reflects on her Childhood, Family, and Career
My life has been a series of serendipitous events of good fortune and also hard work. My best example of serendipity was when I met my husband on a train in Spain because we were accidentally assigned the same seat. We fell in love immediately and just celebrated our 54th anniversary.
Given where I started, I’m not supposed to be where I am right now. I am the daughter of working class, Puerto Rican immigrants. My parents had very little formal education. My mother made it through her third year of high school and my father had to leave school in fourth grade. My parents did not have the knowledge or wherewithal to help us through school, and certainly not to push us toward college.
I spoke only Spanish until I went to school. I never saw or heard about anybody like me in books. I didn’t read a book by a Puerto Rican until I was out of college. All of that has an impact. You start to think there’s something wrong with you and your people rather than the system that created that kind of perspective and instilled it in you.
From the time I started school, I knew that I wanted to be a teacher because I saw teachers as women with power, which was rare. I loved working with younger kids and I made a decision early on that I wanted to go to college and teach. When I was in fourth grade, my teacher asked the class, “How many of you are going to college?” I was in a class of mostly African-American and Puerto Rican kids. I raised my hand high up in the air and as I looked around, I saw that I was the only one with my hand up.
Until I was 13, we lived in a poor, working class neighborhood. My father owned a bodega in Brooklyn and it was because of his investment in that business and willingness to work very long hours—he worked 16 to 20 hours a day, every day, at the bodega—that at that point he was able to buy a house in the middle-class neighborhood of East Flatbush . We were the first Puerto Rican family on our block and probably one of the first in the entire neighborhood. By moving to East Flatbush, I was able to attend one of the best public high schools in New York City. My new classmates did not talk about IF they’re going to college, but WHEN they’re going to college and WHERE they’re going to college. Essentially, we moved zip codes and that changed my life.
I did well in high school but because going to college was not on their agenda, I had to ask my father if I could go to college. It wasn’t because my parents didn’t support our education; it was simply because they had never had the experience before and knew very little about it. One night, I waited for him to get home and I still remember being very nervous as I walked over to him and said, “I want to go to college. Can I go to college?” And he said, “Do what you can to get in, and we’ll make sure that we support you.”
I attended St. John’s University in Queens; at the time, they had a small campus in Brooklyn, which is where my sister and I went. I loved it; college changed my life and gave me a different perspective. I felt very much at home at St. John’s. I was involved in the Spanish club, where I became president, and the international relations club where I became vice-president. I was also very active in a sorority. My experience at St. John’s changed how I interacted in the world.
After graduating, I spent a year studying for my master’s degree in a program through New York University in Madrid where, as I’ve mentioned, I met my future husband. After returning from Madrid, I started working in the field of education and everything fell into place. I think I landed exactly where I was supposed to land. I loved teaching and later being a professor and researcher. First, I taught in an intermediate school in Brooklyn and after that, I was a teacher in the first bilingual school in the Northeast. After several years of teaching elementary and intermediate school, I was recruited to the Puerto Rican Studies Department at Brooklyn College. Even though I didn’t yet have a doctorate, they hired me because I had been a bilingual teacher and they were creating a teacher preparation program within the Puerto Rican Studies department.
It was a volatile time in terms of civil rights as different communities were demanding recognition. I was involved in these demands, participating in takeovers, demonstrations, and other activities. I was briefly arrested for being one of the “BC44” for taking over the Registrar’s Office. It was a heady time that taught me a great deal about the importance of civics. Three years later, we moved to Massachusetts so that I could study for my doctorate. The first course I took in the School of Education, now the College of Education, was an introduction to multicultural education. It was 1975 and the field was brand new.
Ever since I learned English, which started when I was six years old, I was always a reader. And as a child, I gravitated toward the books that spoke to me. The most inspiring were books about adventurous women, like Heidi, Little Women, even Mary Poppins. One of my research areas as a faculty member was Puerto Rican children’s literature, maybe because I never saw books about Puerto Ricans when I was a kid. The field really grabbed me. We weren’t at all like the people in the books that I read and I guess it’s no surprise that I ended up focusing on literature and education as a graduate student and, later, as a researcher and teacher. I went to Spain to study Spanish and Hispanic literature. As an academic, I focused on Puerto Rican literature and multicultural education. I also liked history. I took a course on the constitution at St. John’s as an undergraduate student. And that was, I think, my favorite course.
I have written over a dozen books throughout my career and I would say that my first, in 1992: Affirming Diversity: the Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education best encapsulates me as a writer and educator. It took me many years to write and many more for all of my ideas to take root. The first edition was selected by the Museum of Education at the University of South Carolina as one of the books that helped define education in the 20th century. I’m very proud of that.
In the past year, several of my books have done really well. I wrote Why We Teach Now in 2015 because I felt that the conditions in education were starker, more difficult due to the standardization of testing, and other factors. I am currently working with my publisher on a 3rd edition and I asked my daughter Alicia López, also a teacher, to be my co-editor.
I wrote my memoir in 2016, which put me in touch with my life: where I had been, how grateful I was to have learned from so many people in my past, including my family. It’s a piece of my family’s history.
Years ago, I realized that mentoring has been the most important aspect of both my professional and personal life. Mentoring has a legacy that no book can have because it resides in the people one is able to influence. You are influencing a life directly that way. I think it’s my most important contribution to the field. After the books are out of print, the lives that people impact through mentoring will go on.
I always said to my doctoral students, “Don’t try to be neutral. You can’t be neutral”. We all come to wherever we are with our own biases and assumptions, and the best we can do is to confront them honestly. Since I first became a teacher my own learning, or unlearning and relearning, has been a work in progress. I guess that’s why I love the field of education. A lot of history is now smacking us in the face. Even though my professional life has been devoted to equity, diversity, and social justice, I’m learning new things every day about the injustice that different communities face.
I think the humanities can help us understand the current crisis affecting both our institutions and our personal lives. The humanities are essential. They help us open our minds to new perspectives. They help us to think more deeply. They give us the wherewithal to challenge assumptions, especially our own. They allow us to calculate risks and so to take more, to be courageous. Social justice issues have come to the fore more than ever. People have an increasing need to reckon with them.
The humanities immerse us in new ideas, new perspectives, and new challenges that we haven’t faced before. For instance, there’s a movement in my hometown of Amherst about reparations. I want to see what I can learn about it, and what I can do. That’s the humanities in action. How is it that we haven’t had these conversations before? The humanities can help illuminate these things.