Memoir of a Visionary: Antonia Pantoja (Hispanic Civil Rights) - Hardcover

Pantoja, Antonia

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9781558853652: Memoir of a Visionary: Antonia Pantoja (Hispanic Civil Rights)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558853650 ISBN 13: 9781558853652

Publisher: Arte Publico Pr, 2002

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The autobiography of a founder of ASPIRA, the national non-profit organization devoted to Puerto Rican leadership development. She discusses her birth and youth in Puerto Rico, her move to New York City in the 1940s, her founding of ASPIRA, her years as an academic, and her involvement in American politics. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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From Publishers Weekly:

Born in Puerto Rico in 1922 to an unwed mother, Pantoja was a young teacher on his native island before immigrating to New York in 1944 and becoming one of the most important Puerto Rican organizers and activists in thei city. A winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, Pantoja has crafted a sincere and politically illuminating autobiography that sticks to ways and means, and the complex encounters and emotions that accompany them. Beginning as an assembly-line worker in a wartime electronics factory, and soon moving over to designing lampshades for a local manufacturer, Pantoja moved from her room uptown to Greenwich Village and lived an artist's life. A job at an east 110th Street community center led her to a Hunter College bachelor's degree and to founding and becoming chair of the Hispanic Young Adult Association. After doing political and union organizing work and completing an M.A. in social work at Columbia (rare for a minority woman at that time), Pantoja was a charter member of New York's Commission on Intergroup Relations, one of the first multiracial task forces, in 1958. In the 1960s, she helped found the influential Puerto Rican Forum and ASPIRA (the Spanish imperative for "aspire") and helped implement Johnson's War on Poverty. Never playing up more sensational aspects of her life (such as helping a friend smuggle guns to the Haganah in the mid-1940s), she focuses primarily and with incisive commentary and insight on her political work. If her prose is clinical and dispassionate, her accomplishments are anything but.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

Puerto Rican activist Pantoja was awarded the prestigious Medal of Freedom in 1996 in recognition of her work in organizing Puerto Ricans to challenge the barriers of poverty, increase political involvement, and promote economic development. In her memoir, Pantoja recalls a youth of poverty and a family that sparked her passion and commitment to improving conditions for her neighbors and other Puerto Ricans. She recalls her early years of striving for a better education, teaching in rural areas, and getting a glimpse of the powerlessness of Puerto Rico in relations with the U.S. She moved to New York in the mid-1940s and was initiated into U.S. racism and color differences far more pronounced than in Puerto Rico. While working in factories, she earned a degree in social work, but she was much more interested in community organizing and eventually developed ASPIRA, a nonprofit organization devoted to nurturing education and leadership among Puerto Rican youth. This is an inspiring look at a community-spirited individual and the development of a grassroots organization. Vanessa Bush
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