Antonia Pantoja (September 13, 1922 – May 24, 2002), was a Puerto Rican educator, social worker, feminist, civil rights leader and the founder of ASPIRA, the Puerto Rican Forum, Boricua College and Producir. In 1996, she was the first Puerto Rican woman to receive the American Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Early life and education
Pantoja was born in Puerta de Tierra, in San Juan, Puerto Rico on September 13, 1922 into a poor family of laundry and tobacco workers. She was raised by her mother, Alejandrina Pantoja Acosta, and her grandparents, Conrado Pantoja Santos and Luisa Acosta Rivera; her later activism was influenced by her grandfather, who was a labor organizer at a factory of the American Tobacco Company. At a young age, Pantoja developed asthma, which would affect her for the rest of her life; she also contracted tuberculosis during her first year of high school and spent three months recovering in a sanatorium. She received a teaching certificate in 1942 and taught for two years at rural schools in Cuchilla and Toa Alta, where she developed a passion for education and supporting disadvantaged students.
In 1944, Pantoja moved to New York City as a part of a major wave of Puerto Rican migration during World War II, and to relieve herself of the burden of providing for her mother and siblings. She found work as a wartime welder in a radio factory, then in factory making lamps, where she helped unionize the workers in her factory.
Pantoja attended Hunter College on a scholarship, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1952. She then attended the Columbia School of Social Work on scholarships from the Mary Antoinette Cannon Foundation and the John Hay Whitney Foundation, graduating with her master's degree in social work in 1954.
In 1973, she earned her Ph.D. from Union Graduate School (now Union Institute & University) in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Social work and early activism
In the early 1950s, while living on the Lower East Side with her then-partner, Helen Lehew, Pantoja began a job as a youth worker at a community center on 110th Street, where she was able to engage with the local Puerto Rican community. The organization focused on community-oriented projects, such as refurbishing churches, helping register voters, and planning the first Puerto Rican Youth Conference. Community figures like Josephine Nieves, Yolanda Sánchez, Luis Nuñez, and Alice Cardona were early members of the group.
In 2015, she was named by Equality Forum as one of their 31 Icons of the 2015 LGBT History Month.
Later years
After 1984, Pantoja moved to Puerto Rico for health reasons, where she established Producir, an organization which provides economic assistance to small businesses, and Provivienda, which works to develop housing for the needy. In 1998 she returned to New York, concluding that she was clearly now a Nuyorican, given her negative personal experiences in Puerto Rico.
Dr. Antonia Pantoja died of cancer in Manhattan, New York on May 24, 2002. She was survived by her longtime partner, Dr. Wilhelmina Perry. Filmmaker Lillian Jimenez of the Latino Educational Media Center in New York City worked on a documentary on the life of Pantoja.