READING PUERTO RiCAN MIGRATION IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ANTONIA PANTOJA 87

The Return

Pantoja left and returned to New York City a number of times during her life.
The primary cause she cites for her departures is her health problems with
asthma. Pantoja engages in no nostalgia about Puerto Rico in any of her
autobiographical texts. Once she leaves Puerto Rico, she mentions little about
her family, her communication with them or whether she visited before her
two returns to live there. Nor does she mention feelings of homesickness or
persistent thoughts about Puerto Rico. One indication that she gives about
these sentiments is found in her oral testimony. In it she talks about a time
when she was advised to leave New York; referring to Puerto Rico as home,
she states, "yo me fui pa' casa" ( I went home). Twenty-four years after she
left Puerto Rico, she could still refer to Puerto Rico as casa (home). This
leads to the question, what constituted home for Pantoja and for other Puerto
Rican migrants?
 Demographic information suggests that Puerto Rico has signified home
to many Puerto Rican migrants, and many have maintained a circular
migration since the earliest periods of migration. This is so, I would
hypothesize, because the conditions in Puerto Rico, for poor and working
class people, were bad, but they were not life threatening. Thus, the path
that was already paved for Pantoja in her migration to New York included a
u-turn option, and she was preceded by many return migrants.
 Pantoja encountered numerous roadblocks in her new life in Puerto Rico.
Most wearing on her, not unsurprisingly, was the island's more difficult
economic situation, particularly employment. She clearly expected that the
social capital she had developed in New York City, that of the founder of
Puerto Rican community institutions, would enable her to find or somehow
invent employment in Puerto Rico. But she frequently encountered
frustration, reservation on the part of her peers, and rejection. One example
comes in the realm of her teaching career. In New York, she was hired as a
full time employee by the school of social work affiliated with Columbia
University, an Ivy League university. In Puerto Rico, she was hired to teach
as an adjunct at the School of Social Work at the University of Puerto Rico.
She describes the chilly reception she received, attributing it to her style of
expressing her opinions in a direct fashion with older more experienced
faculty members in her program. The students, on the other hand, gave her
an enthusiastic reception, as evident in a story she relates in her oral history:

 Cuando yo llegue por la mafiana, estaban los estudiantes esperando afuera.
 Yo tenia un afro bien grande casi como lo de Angela Davis (laughs). Ademas,
 yo tenia un fotinguito...volkswagon, el chiquito el bug gris que tenia un flor
 amarillo en el bonete y un flor en cada puerta. Yo usaba sandalias de cuero
 hechas en el Village en Nueva York. Yo no usaba medias, tenia vestidos simples,
 sencillos. Yo hacia un contrast con el resto de la facultad. La clase mia