The story of Sonia Sotomayor and her Supreme Court nomination rippled with pride through the Latino community in Dallas as members saw, in the sum of the judge's life, parts of their own narrative.

"I am glad that it will be commonplace for young Latinas to think it is nothing unusual to have a Latina Supreme Court justice," said Lena Levario, a 47-year-old criminal court judge in Dallas County who reflected Tuesday on her Mexican-American family's struggles with discrimination in West Texas.

Liz Cedillo-Pereira, a Dallas immigration lawyer, called her morning "surreal"–thanks to the power of Sotomayor's story as a girl of Puerto Rican descent "who made her way from the barrio to the Ivy League to the federal appellate court."

When she flipped on the television to the White House news conference, Cedillo-Pereira was taken back to her Ivy League years at the University of Pennsylvania, where she started a Latina sorority.

"I felt as if [Sotomayor] could be one of my sorority sisters," she said.

She hoped she wouldn't stumble on any words. Appraising the performance of the 54-year-old judge, Cedillo-Pereira said, "She was perfect."

Nathan Cortez, a professor at the Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University, was taken back to his days at Stanford Law School. He was moved by the story that Sotomayor sometimes felt out of place at Princeton, as a student reared in the Bronx. Cortez grew up in urban Spokane, but nonetheless felt like an outsider at times at Stanford.