Antonia Pantoja, a Nuyorican Builder of Institutions

Antonia Pantoja was a fierce community organizer and builder of influential institutions. Throughout her life she created organizations that enhanced the lives of Puerto Ricans and other minoritized communities. She was a dreamer with a vision of social justice who worked to create the world she desired. In her words, “You cannot live a life that is lukewarm. You’ve got to live a life of commitment and passion. A passionate life. And by passion, I mean . . . the passion of doing, producing, thinking, and dealing with making the world a better place.”[1]

Born in 1922 in Puerta de Tierra, a small barrio on the outskirts of the city of San Juan, Pantoja grew up poor and hungry. During her childhood, her first lessons in organizing were taught by her grandfather, a cigar worker at the American Tobacco Company. She watched as he and other strikers were brutalized as they waged a strike for better pay. In Puerto Rico at that time options were limited, especially for poor Black people like Pantoja, but she struggled to help provide for her family. She earned a degree at a two-year college that prepared her to teach lower grades in rural schools. The conditions were oppressive, pay was sometimes withheld, and Pantoja resented the gendered traditional expectations of life in Puerto Rico. In 1944, at the tender age of nineteen, she left Puerto Rico, joining the migration of poor people fleeing to New York.

New York City in the forties was an exciting place. Pantoja lived with other young people who engaged in passionate discussions about art, philosophy, and politics. The 1940s was a decade that saw a large migration of Puerto Ricans to New York; like Pantoja, they came searching for better opportunities for themselves and their families. Antonia Pantoja’s social consciousness and political awareness developed as she observed the horrible living conditions of her community, and she began to organize others interested in responding to these challenges. She committed herself to educating leaders who would engage in projects to change the life chances of Puerto Ricans. This was a true act of courage, since at that time it was rare for a woman to be so vocal and active in the political arena. In 1953, Pantoja and other graduate students at Columbia University formed the Hispanic Youth Adult Association, which later became the Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs (PRACA).[2]

In 1961, Pantoja founded an organization called ASPIRA. She chose this name because “aspira,” or “breathe,” is an upbeat one-word command that suggests movement and strength. ASPIRA took root in high schools and clubs for Puerto Rican students that offered them a sense of belonging. Its goals were to organize young Puerto Ricans to develop the skills they needed to become leaders, and to deepen cultural pride. ASPIRA opened up new horizons for Puerto Ricans who learned about applying to college and securing financial aid, while also immersing themselves in Puerto Rican history and culture and engaging in community service. The leadership and social skills they acquired motivated them to believe in themselves and take an active role in their communities.

ASPIRA has expanded into a national association with chapters in six states—Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania—plus Puerto Rico. ASPIRA now reaches thousands of students of all backgrounds through hundreds of schools and clubs.

As ASPIRA grew in the 1960s and 1970s its participants became involved in civil rights struggles for the Puerto Rican community. ASPIRANTES, those who graduated from the program, became leaders of movements for social change. Some became Young Lords[3] and fought for the empowerment of their communities, while others became social workers, lawyers, and leaders of grassroots organizations advocating for Puerto Rican rights.

ASPIRA represented Puerto Ricans in diverse ways. In schools at that time, Puerto Rican children were often punished for speaking Spanish, placed in special education classes because they did not speak English, or were given an inferior education. The dropout rate for Puerto Ricans exceeded 85%. In 1972, Pantoja and ASPIRA sued the New York City Board of Education charging that Puerto Ricans were being denied their basic right to a meaningful education and equal opportunities. ASPIRA won the lawsuit and the federal court instituted a consent decree which stipulated that New York City had to establish bilingual and English as a Second Language (ESL) classes for students with limited English proficiency.

Antonio Pantoja’s legacy extends far beyond ASPIRA. She earned her PhD in 1973 and in 1978 accepted a position as associate professor at the School of Social Work at San Diego State University. There she continued to be an institution builder. At San Diego State she met and collaborated with Dr. Wilhelmina Perry, who would become her partner for thirty years. Together they established the innovative Graduate School for Community Development in San Diego. This institution, of which Pantoja served as president for several years, prepared students to tackle the many problems plaguing poor communities in the United States. The pioneering curriculum included leadership development, political theory, philosophy, art, and economics. Pantoja and Perry operated the school for fourteen years.

In 1983, at the age of sixty-two, Pantoja retired, and she and Perry moved to Cubuy, a small town of 10,000 in Puerto Rico. There again, Pantoja served her people. Learning that these two progressive leaders were now part of their community, the mayor of Cubuy and other leaders reached out to the women for their assistance with economic development and securing resources. With the help of the two leaders, within a year Cubuy was incorporated and therefore eligible for grants. The following year they established PRODUCIR (Produce), a community development project. Pantoja always explained that the name PRODUCIR came from a quotation from Ramón Emeterio Betances, the renowned nineteenth-century Puerto Rican doctor and freedom fighter, who once stated, “Trabajar es producir, y producir es servir a la humanidad” (“To work is to produce, and to produce is to serve humanity”). PRODUCIR, which still operates today, developed a range of innovative economic projects including the introduction of new farming techniques such as hydroponics. They also secured much needed services to the area, such as medical clinics and a post office.

Again feeling out of place in Puerto Rico due to oppressive gender roles and patriarchal traditions, Pantoja and Perry decided to go back to New York in 1998. Pantoja always said that at heart she was a Nuyorican[4] who belonged in New York City. She published her memoir, Memoir of a Visionary: Antonia Pantoja in March 2002, just weeks before she died.

Pantoja was the recipient of many honors in her lifetime. For example, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton in 1996 for her lifelong dedication to improving the lives of marginalized communities and creating educational opportunities for Puerto Ricans and all Latinos. In 2012 Pantoja was posthumously inducted into Chicago’s Legacy Walk, which commemorates the contributions of notable LGBTQ individuals who toiled to make the world a better place.

Antonia Pantoja’s greatest gift was her ability to motivate people to engage in community building for social change. As she once said, “People were asking about the future, and what do you do about the future, you make the future, you make the future, I make the future, we make the future together.”

Selected Bibliography

Jiménez, Lillian, dir. Antonia Pantoja ¡Presente! Women Make Movies, 2008. http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c776.shtml

Nuñez, Louis. “Reflections on Puerto Rican History: ASPIRA in the Sixties and the Coming of Age of the Stateside Puerto Rican Community.” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 21, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 33–47.

Pantoja, Antonia. Memoir of a Visionary: Antonia Pantoja. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002.

Sánchez Korrol, Virginia, and Vicki Ruiz, eds. “Antonia Pantoja and the Power of Community Action.” Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Torres, Lourdes. “Queering Puerto Rican Women’s Narratives: Gaps and Silences in the Memoirs of Antonia Pantoja and Luisita López Torregrosa.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 9, no. 1 (2009): 83–112.

Lourdes Torres is a professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University. She is the editor of the journal Latino Studies and the co-editor of the Global Latin/o Americas series of the University of Ohio Press. She is the author of Puerto Rican Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Study of a New York Suburb (1997; repr. 2010) and the co-editor of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (1991) and Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression (2003). Her co-authored book, Spanish in Chicago, is forthcoming.