VICTORIA Nf-EZ


feminine identity that is visible more broadly in Latin American culture as
well. Pantoja remembers being very aware of the injustice in gender roles
since she grew up with an aunt who was unmarried and was expected to
stay in her grandparents' home to help support that household.
 The first version of this story conforms to a structural explanation for
migration, primarily by recognizing the poverty that affected three
generations of her family: her grandmother's life as a head of household
after her grandfather died, her mother's life and her own life. The second
version of the story of her migration decision is a key moment in the revision
of her memory and it emphasizes the oppressive gender role that constrained
Pantoja as well as her agency as an individual. The decision comes in an
early moment of her adult development and it exemplifies the ways in which
Pantoja contests the definition of Puerto Rican woman, although it is not the
first example of her defiance of this role.
 Two other factors are addressed less directly within the narrative, but
the reader cannot overlook the importance of these factors in explaining
this writer's decision to migrate. Pantoja grew up in a milieu in which the
migratory path to the United States was already well trodden. Although the
scale of the migration did not approach the level that would be achieved in
the decades of the fifties and the sixties, Pantoja was exposed to migration
north through her personal experiences. Her mother and uncle migrated in
1921 and later returned to Puerto Rico. She recounts stories of her neighbors
who had impressive material possessions that resulted from such migration
to the U.S. Hollywood movies presented life in the U.S. as glamorous. This
promise of a radical alteration in the material conditions of life alone may
have been enticing for a young woman who had struggled with the limitations
and humiliations of poverty her whole life. The imagined personal freedoms
would only have solidified this dream for a woman who was eager to escape
the constrictions of her family and was ready for an adventure.

Arriving in the North

In almost all Puerto Rican migration narratives, the encounter with the new
northern environment involves some great and dramatic disillusionment.
Pantoja's autobiography provides an excellent example of this.
 Arriving in the vicinity of the United States on a number of foggy days,
Pantoja was unaware that her ship had sailed up the Mississippi River and
she would come ashore in New Orleans. Arriving in New Orleans in the
1940s meant arriving in the Jim Crow South, a South she had never heard
about and had not seen in the movies. Pantoja expected the fabled arrival
experience in New York that she and everyone else had heard about in Puerto
Rico; instead she was confronted and confounded by the racial system of
order in the South, the story of which she had not learned in Puerto Rico.
 Pantoja and three friends had a layover in New Orleans before they could
take a train to New York. It was a long day in which she had three encounters