PROVIDENCE — Back in 1990, the Center for Hispanic Policy and Advocacy invited speakers from across the country to Providence to present the city’s Hispanic youth with role models. Marta V. Martinez, the group’s former executive director, remembered one of the guests was a big-shot lawyer from New York City. Her name was Sonia Sotomayor.

“She was very charismatic,” Martinez recalled yesterday. “She was very down-to-earth. We took her out and she just fit right in.”

So when Martinez heard that CHisPA’s 1990 panelist was President Obama’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, she was pleasantly surprised it was an Hispanic nominee, but not surprised it was Sotomayor.

“It’s time,” she added. “The Hispanic community hasn’t had an appointment at that level. Ever.”

Sotomayor’s life story of growing up in a Bronx housing project, raised by a single mother from Puerto Rico whose husband died when Sotomayor was 9, was compelling, members of the state’s legal and Hispanic communities said. But they said what impressed them most was that given her work as a criminal and civil litigator in New York City and service on both the federal District and Appeals Courts, her personal life story was almost superfluous.

Dr. Pablo Rodriguez, chief executive officer of Latino Public Radio, said of her personal life story, “It’s gravy. It’s gravy.”

District Court Associate Judge Rafael A. Ovalles, the state’s first Hispanic jurist, guessed that since he was in law school he has probably read thousands of Supreme Court decisions, not one of them by a Latino justice. Now, he said, that may change.

“I did my undergraduate thesis on [U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin] Cardozo because his name sounded somewhat Latino,” Ovalles said.

“I’m very excited,” he said. “Making our system as representative as we possibly can, that’s what makes our country strong.”

David A. Logan, dean of the Roger Williams University Law School, said it’s very rare for District Court judges appointed by one party’s president to be elevated by the other’s. But that happened to Sotomayor; she was nominated for District Court by Republican George H. W. Bush in 1992 and elevated by Democrat Bill Clinton in 1998.

Logan said she is a signal that Hispanic Americans have arrived as part of the nation’s political life.

“It’s recognition of the important role Hispanics will play” in the future of the nation, Logan said. “This is a marker. We are making it possible for our children that ethnicity will matter less and less because we are all Americans.”

Melba Depena, a member of the board at Rhode Island’s Latino Policy Institute, said Sotomayor’s professional and personal background would enhance the high court’s deliberations.

“You have someone who is obviously qualified and committed to the law,” Depena said, “but also someone who understands how the Supreme Court can influence people’s lives.”

When President Obama first announced he would look for a nominee with empathy for working people, critics said that might mean someone who followed personal feelings and not the law.

Local lawyer Roberto Gonzalez said that missed the point.

“I was a judge for 12 years and every judge brings with him or her a whole wealth of experiences that will affect how they will rule on cases,” he said. “At the appeals level, you are actually making law. You use our Constitution and rich history of case law, but you must also take into account what a modern society needs.”

Logan said personal life experience has been valued on the nation’s highest court. He noted former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor spoke of how the first African-American justice, Thurgood Marshall, shaped her outlook.

“Although all of us come to the court with our own personal histories and experiences, Justice Marshall brought a special perspective,” O’Connor wrote in Thurgood Marshall: The Influence of a Raconteur in 1992. “His was the eye of a lawyer who saw the deepest wounds in the social fabric and used the law to help heal them.”

Some accounts have implied that Sotomayor was brusque in her courtroom and might not have a temperament suited to the Supreme Court. Gonzalez scoffed at that.

“She’s from the Bronx,” he said. “She’s not going to take any crap from anyone.”

The state’s two U.S. senators praised the nomination. Sen. Jack Reed said Sotomayor was “a superb jurist and an amazing success story.” If confirmed, she would be the only justice who has actually presided over a federal trial, he said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will conduct the hearings on Sotomayor’s nomination, was enthusiastic.

“Her nomination to be the first Hispanic justice is truly historic,” Whitehouse said.

Depena said there was only one part of the Bronx-bred Sotomayor’s background that she had to grapple with.

“I didn’t think I could deal with a Supreme Court justice who is a Yankee fan,” she said.

jhill@projo.com