READING PUERTO RICAN MIGRATION IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ANTONIA PANTOJA 85

 with the realities of Jim Crow. Her group of friends (made up of two Black
 Puerto Ricans, herself included, and two White Puerto Ricans) tried to buy
 food in a restaurant close to the train station and were refused service; they
 went to a movie and were escorted to seats in the balcony and finally at the
 end of the day, they boarded a train to travel North and encountered a classic
 experience of African Americans. She writes:

 When our train was announced, we approached the gate where there was a
 mob of people boarding. A black porter called out, "Niggers in the back."
 Here was the problem again. It became evident that Negroes had a negative
 position. We did not know why they used the word "nigger." It was confusing
 that the people sending Negroes to the back were Negroes themselves. (55)

This was only Pantoja's first day in the United States and already the impact
of these three experiences felt like a "raping of our innocence" (55).
 Pantoja's arrival scene in the South is one example of an intertwining of
African American and Puerto Rican migration narratives. The major vehicle
for leaving the South for the vast majority of African Americans was the
train and it became a symbol that appears in many representations of the
African American migration, a parallel to the steamship and then the propeller
plane for Puerto Ricans.
 Pantoja's declaration of immigrant innocence of the racism to be
encountered in the states may sound incredulous coming from a woman
who came from a Black family in Puerto Rico, also a society shaped by racial
hierarchy. And yet, the images of life in North America that were projected
around the world failed to tell the story of Jim Crow or other forms of racial
terrorism that were carried out in the United States under segregation.
 Pantoja came from a Black family that was rooted in a neighborhood with
a large Black and mixed race population in Santurce, and she visited her
stepfather's family in Loiza (the center of Afro-Puerto Rican life) fairly
frequently. However, she states that she had not really thought much about
race until migrating to the United States. She writes about the realizations
that she came to under the tutelage of one of her first mentors, Dr. Frank
Horne, an African American who was the head of the newly formed New
York Commission on Intergroup Relations (86):

 Even though it may sound incredible, it was in those planning meetings that
 I fully realized and understood that I was a black woman and that in Puerto
 Rico, being black was a lesser condition than being white, that although racism
 was not practiced in the same manner as in the United States, it was
 nonetheless practiced effectively. (86)

 Pantoja's encounters with the dominant racial social codes in the U.S.
gave her a means of better developing an understanding of race that took
into account Puerto Rican notions of race and U.S. notions of race, a new