READING PUERTO RICAN MIGRATION IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ANTONIA PANTOJA 89

Rico one more time. This time, she returned to Puerto Rico with her life
partner, and was able to fit herself into a world of work more easily. Consistent
with her autobiographical texts, she cites work as well as a sense of mission
as the main reasons for moving to Puerto Rico a second time. After attending
an international conference on the status of Puerto Rico, Pantoja recalls that
she felt compelled to take her skills back to Puerto Rico so that she could
bring her theory and methods of community development and apply them
to poor Puerto Rican communities. Her second return seems as though it
might have been more successful since she lived and worked for fourteen
years in rural Puerto Rico; however, this period is also related with a tone of
frustration at how things worked or did not work in Puerto Rico.

Conclusion

In my reading of this autobiography, place is an important element in the
formation of this activist/writer's identity. Pantoja makes no global statements
about what Puerto Rico represents to her or to any other migrant, and yet,
in her narrative the island emerges as a place of social constraints and of
patriarchal power hierarchies that an outsider with U.S.-based social capital
was ill-equipped to handle. Her position in New York and in the United States
was built on a position of working to help ordinary Puerto Ricans surmount
the barriers they encountered in U.S. society, barriers that were often
determined by class, ethnoracial identity, and gender. Ironically, in her
memoir there are few memories recollected in which she personally
experienced the restraining forces asserted by confining class, ethno-racial
and gender relations in the United States although a number are evident
while she lived in Puerto Rico.
 Pantoja's autobiography will most prominently receive attention within
the Northeastern U.S. Puerto Rican community that either knows of her, or
knows of ASPIRA as an important institution in urban Puerto Rican
communities. My attention was drawn to the autobiography because it is
part of a small group of recently published North American Puerto Rican
autobiographies and it makes a contribution to the ongoing project of
understanding the heterogeneous experiences of post-World War II Puerto
Rican migrants to the U.S. One of the major cultural formations to emerge
from the Post-World War II Puerto Rican migration is the construction of the
Nuyorican, a term and identity that Pantoja embraces in her autobiography.
 Earlier in this article I discussed the play La Carreta, one family's story of
dispossession and dislocation. The family in that play never finds a place of
peace in their migratory journey to the U.S. and the play closes with the
remaining family members returning to Puerto Rico. Antonia Pantoja's story
is a different one. It is the story of a woman who finds her place in the
United States and who creates a new identity, that of a Nuyorican.