Living in that Latino moment

There was a moment when it struck me as to just how grand of a moment I was living during the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor.

It wasn’t all the cameras or reporters or that I was in the presence of such powerful people.

It was actually the outpour of kudos and comments from my friends and family, saying how proud or jealous they were that I was covering Sotomayor.

Up to this point: I held the First Lady’s hand for a cool 10 seconds, walked right up to Barack Obama and crawled around shooting photos of Dick Cheney at the National Press Club.

These were all points that I had boasted about and I thought myself a privileged member of the Fourth Estate.

But it was Sotomayor who impressed everyone I know.

From the very first moment when people saw my photos and updates, they began to write me and that’s when I knew how significant this moment was to mi gente- to my Hispanic people-and to women, Latinas in particular.

It was then that I knew that it was even bigger than I could have ever anticipated because she represented a shift for Hispanics that we could only feel and not see coming, even in our perpetual optimism.

- Erick Geee

~ by Erick Galindo on July 17, 2009.