VICTORIA NOIEZ


York (CUNY) located at Hunter College. The oral history is a form of an
autobiographical text that is more obviously shaped by the interests of an
outsider, the interviewer, than is the typical autobiography. Pantoja's oral
history takes on importance in my reading of her autobiography because it
serves as the template for Pantoja's own autobiography. The last two thirds
of her written autobiography follow almost exactly the chronology of her life
that she presents in her oral history. She recounts many of the same anecdotes
in both texts, suggesting that the questions that she was frequently asked
about her life may have shaped her sense of what to include in her
autobiography. The critical difference between the two texts is that in her
published book, Pantoja breaks what may have been an otherwise lifelong
public silence about her personal life and goes into great detail in describing
her childhood and coming of age in Puerto Rico.

Autobiography and Puerto Rican Migration

Autobiography is a literary form in which the writer shapes a set of life memories
and in this way shapes the self that emerges through the writing. As such, the
inclusions, the exclusions, the revisions, and the silences are all significant as the
author creates a version of the self that will be presented publicly. If an
autobiography is published, then it is also a text that involves outsiders in editing
and shaping the text and in this way editing and reshaping the sense of a life and
the messages that are communicated by the author. A published autobiography
can not be read then as an unmediated account of the author's life.
 Pantoja's book assumes literary importance as it is one of a small number
of published autobiographies written by a U.S. Puerto Rican, a Black Puerto
Rican woman activist, and perhaps the first full-length autobiography written
by a Puerto Rican lesbian who comes out publicly.2 Pantoja's book explores
the ways that race, class, gender, and heterosexism were active forces that
shaped her life and speaks most extensively and directly to the meaning of
race. Implicitly her text speaks strongly on the topic of gender, class, and
the development of an ethnic identity in the U.S. To many she is essentially
silent on the topic of her lesbianism, an aspect of her writing that can raise
questions among contemporary readers who consider writing about gay
identity to be an obvious necessity for someone who lived the majority of
her adult life as a lesbian.3 In my reading of her text, I hear Pantoja's voice
on her gay identity as muted, not silent, a tone that reflects her experience
in the historical period in which her gay identity was formed. Living as a
lesbian impacted many of the decisions that she made, a fact that she
acknowledges a number of times in the work.4 Breaking the silence about
her sexual identity in a public realm was a milestone she accomplished for
the first time in this text. One can only speculate that if time had permitted
she might have continued writing her memoirs, furthering the exploration
of her personal and professional memories.5