READING PUERTO RICAN MIGRATION IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ANTONIA PANTOJA 79

 For readers interested in social identities, autobiographies can
demonstrate the ways in which individuals conform to or defy society's
expectations about the roles of women and members of a particular race,
gender, or social class. Autobiographies are both reflective of and constitutive
of social and cultural identities. To the extent that autobiographies are looked
to for historical accounts, they may confirm or contest them, compiled either
through the memories of individuals, collective memories, or through
published books. Pantoja's autobiographical texts counter the dominant
narrative about Puerto Rican migrants coming to the U.S. in the twentieth
century, and she also presents a portrait of someone who contested the
options available to a poor Puerto Rican woman born in the first half of the
twentieth century.

Who was Antonia Pantoja?

Antonia Pantoja was an activist, a builder of community organizations, a
student and a teacher of community organizing, and a migrant from Puerto
Rico. Her most celebrated accomplishment is her work with ASPIRA from
1961-1966, perhaps because ASPIRA itself has enjoyed high praise for its
accomplishments as a youth development organization that responded
creatively and holistically to address the crisis in the education of Puerto
Rican students in New York in the 1960s. In 1996 she won the Presidential
Medal of Honor primarily recognizing her work with ASPIRA, the highest
honor awarded to civilians in the U.S.
 Pantoja was born in 1922 to a single mother and raised largely by her
grandparents. Pantoja's childhood is marked by the social stresses related
to the culture of respectability. Her family made great efforts to protect her
status. They insured that she would be recognized as an hija legitima (a
legitimate daughter, or one born of legally married parents) by naming her
grandparents as her parents on her birth certificate.
 As the grandchild of a unionized tobacco worker in the early twentieth
century, Pantoja's text can make important contributions to Puerto Rican
working class literature. Such literature shows the injustice workers faced,
the economic impact of having a "skilled" and unionized worker in the family,
and the devastating impact of the loss of this "skilled worker." In Pantoja's
case this was her grandfather, a man who worked for the American Tobacco
Company. Pantoja describes the ways her family descended into deep
poverty following her grandfather's death when she was six: the house no
longer had electricity and their furniture began to disappear. She writes
that there was no longer meat at home, nor was she served milk very often.
She tells of walking many miles to high school with cardboard to cover a
hole in the sole of her shoe. She conjectures that the series of physical
illnesses that plagued her in her adult years may have been due to
malnutrition in her childhood and a case of tuberculosis (33).