82 VICTORIA NOFIEZ

Dancing by Judith Ortiz Cofer. However, Pantoja's migration narrative differs
in certain key respects from the more typical Puerto Rican migration narrative.
In all of the aforementioned texts, the protagonist originates in a rural area.
Not so in Pantoja's case. Pantoja was born in Puerta de Tierra, an historically
Black neighborhood in San Juan, and she was raised in Barrio Obrero, an urban
neighborhood in Santurce, which today is a part of the San Juan metropolitan
area. Pantoja describes Barrio Obrero in the following way:

 Barrio Obrero was built as a housing project for workers and their families
 who had lived in overcrowded areas... Families living in Barrio Obrero did
 not pay rent. They paid taxes at the end of the year. This left us with the
 basic expenses of food, clothing, etc... Barrio Obrero was a good
 neighborhood to grow up in. We all knew each other. There was a spirit of
 belonging and we identified with one another. We knew of other
 neighborhoods, like Sunoco, but we always felt more united and proud of our
 own community. (24-25)

 In Pantoja's autobiography, Barrio Obrero can be understood as a place
of early ideological formation, particularly an ideology that stresses
organizing and resistance, and a place in which she experienced a sense of
belonging. Although she documents the poverty of her childhood, this is
the most positive period of her life in Puerto Rico.
 In La Carreta, Marques presents the idea of return to Puerto Rico as an
option that the women are constantly considering during their stay in New
York and which they choose once they are able to make their own decisions.
The idea of return and the reality is present in many narratives of Puerto
Rican migration, reflecting the reality that travel back to the home country
is quite possible. Thus, in these texts, the country of origin is never something
that is assigned to one's imagination completely; there are visits that offer
opportunities to recall and revise what the place of origin means to the
migrant.8 In Pantoja's case, she returned twice to Puerto Rico, both times
with ideals of being able to carry back the skills and knowledge that she had
developed in the United States. In each of these instances, she expresses a
sense of frustration with Puerto Rico and with constraints that she
encountered, although she lived there for fourteen years during her second
return. This frustration led to her repeated return to New York, leading her
to an identity as a circular migrant.
 Griffin observes that a migration narrative will often be as much about
the place of origin as it is about the new location of the migrant (18). In this
way, African American migration narratives that present life in the new home
as well as the South are translocal and Puerto Rican migration narratives
are transnational. This is certainly the case in Pantoja's book as the first
third of the text is about her early life in Puerto Rico. The writing in this part
of the book is the most compelling, perhaps more easily engaging the reader
because it is about her personal life and not her work life. One of the key