cover image MEMOIRS OF A VISIONARY

MEMOIRS OF A VISIONARY

Antonia Pantoja, . . Arte Publico, $26.95 (384pp) ISBN 978-1-55885-365-2

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. (Mar.)