Reading Puerto Rican Migration in the
 Autobiography of Antonia Pantoja

 Victoria Nnfiez
 Brooklyn College, City University of New York


 For Puerto Ricans living in the continental United States, migration is an
experience that is at once familiar, a contemporary and historical
phenomenon that has shaped our lives, and ephemeral -a momentous event
that threatens to fade from memory with little to memorialize it. In this essay
I discuss literary texts in which writers describe the migration of Puerto
Ricans to the United States in the post-World War II period as sites of memory.
When we look closely at these literary texts we see evidence of the ways in
which individual memory is constructed, revised, and edited. As this
literature is read by a broader audience, it can become constitutive of an
ethnic collective memory and a collective identity within Puerto Rican
communities in the United States.
 In this essay I present a close reading of autobiographical texts by Antonia
Pantoja, primarily her book Memoir of a Visionary, The Autobiography of
Antonia Pantoja. Pantoja's texts present a character whose life and writing
contest traditional notions of the possibilities and limits of a Puerto Rican
woman's life. I explore the ways that she remembers her resistance to
externally imposed gendered, raced and classed identities that could have
limited her life. Both Pantoja's text and her life can be placed in a lineage of
autobiographical writing by other women of Latin American descent whose
texts and lives have been celebrated as fundamentally contestatory, a lineage
that stretches as far back as La Respuesta by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and
extends into the late twentieth century with the publication of the seminal
text Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldua.
 My interest in Pantoja's texts and her life centers on her experience as a
Puerto Rican migrant and the ways in which her texts contribute to the
ongoing revisions of how we understand Puerto Rican migration to the U.S.1
The main autobiographical text I discuss is her 2002 book, but I also introduce
a discussion of an oral history with Pantoja conducted by a member of the
staff at the Centro de Estudios Puertorriquefios at the City University of New