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Antonia Pantoja was born in 1922 in Puerta de Tierra, Puerto Rico. Like Belpré, Pantoja also attended Central High School in Santurce and also enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. In Pantoja’s case she completed a two year normal school diploma at the U.P., going on to complete her four year B.A. at Hunter College, and later an M.S.W. and a Ph.D. She first migrated to the U.S. in 1944 during World War II to New York City where she built a career as a community activist, leader and academic. | ||||||||
| Within Puerto
Rican communities Antonia Pantoja is best known as a founder of ASPIRA
(1961), a Puerto Rican youth organization that sought to support the
positive development of Puerto Rican youth in New York City and to
improve their educational experiences in the New York City Public
Schools. Pantoja first became active in New York community affairs
in the 1950s and her moment of ascendancy in leadership and community
activism occurred simultaneously with the period of the Great Puerto
Rican Migration, a period marked by significant social upheaval for
the masses of Puerto Ricans who migrated, the majority to New York
City. If we view Pantoja as a woman who came of age at the height
of the Great Migration, then the consolidation of her identity as
a leader in New York’s Puerto Rican community occurred during
the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Pantoja was an early student, practitioner
and teacher of community organizing. In 1996 Pantoja was recognized
with a Presidential Medal of Honor for her work with ASPIRA. |
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| Pantoja is the author
of several academic articles on community development. Her first
and only book, Memoirs of a Visionary, The Autobiography of Antonia
Pantoja, joins a small but growing corpus of autobiography by U.S.-based
Puerto Ricans. Similar to Colón, it is expected that a second
book co-authored by Pantoja will be published posthumously, a history
of ASPIRA. Thus, by 2006 there will be two books in print by Pantoja,
an autobiography and a historical book. |
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Copyright © 2005 Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College/ City University of New York.