America is in Carlos Bulosan's heart
This Week’s Winner
MANILA, Philippines – Racedah Perlada Umbalin, 19, writes: “I have three brothers and one younger sister. I love being in communication arts because I know that I can do well in this field. Acting, singing and dancing are my talents. I’m also fond of playing volleyball, table tennis and billiards. I am very outspoken and frank, but considerate of the feelings of other people.”
It was a crime to be a Filipino in California,” Carlos Bulosan said. America is in the Heart is a literary classic. It reflects the collective life experience of thousands of Filipino immigrants who were attracted to this country by its legendary promise of a better life.
I’m not too fond of reading books, but for the sake of a book report I went to our library to borrow America is in the Heart, but the book was missing and it would take them a week to get a new copy, so I didn’t have a choice but to buy the novel from a bookstore.
The first thing I thought when I began reading the book was that I would not be able to relate to the subject: the life experiences of a man who suffered from poverty and was pushed to work abroad for the sake of his family.
It is the same situation millions of Filipinos are facing today.
In the first part of the story, America establishes the rural background that projects Carlos as the archetypical peasant boy seeking a “life of ease and comfort” in the dreamland of milk and honey. Carlos was born in 1913, he grew up on the family farm in Binalonan, Pangasinan, where the struggle against nature and the feudal system had earlier driven two elder brothers to escape to the US. The Bulosan family is depicted as tightly knit with both parents working hard. The father was tilling the land and the mother was earning extra income as an itinerant vendor.
The book tells the story of Carlos from his early days as a peasant child in the Philippines to his days as an itinerant laborer and reformer for Filipinos in America. His family had no choice but to work collectively, while he and his siblings toiled in the fields of Pangasinan or in the United States, so they could have a better life. One thing that struck me about the book was the concept of meeting your siblings for the first time when you’re old enough to remember it. When I read the scene where he first meets his older brother Leon, it seemed very foreign to me. It touchingly brought home the point that many working families do not always have the luxury of living together.
The Bulosan family never seem to be fully together because at least one sibling or parent is away, trying to do his part to help the family survive.
The second part is the “novelistic” section. It’s the sad and angry part. As it unfolds, we see Carlos encountering fascist violence by the police, racist violence by the white farm workers jealous over the loss of employment during the Great Depression, and the corrosion of moral values into which he was born back in the home country. It was hard for me to really relate to all this, although I certainly felt for them and their struggles.
As Carlos travels all across the West Coast, he meets a great many people and seemingly by chance he encounters his brothers who came to America before him. Maybe it was vastly different then, but I had a hard time imagining that continuous traveling on the US West Coast would lead you to your family and old friends as often as it did for Carlos. Perhaps it was because the early Filipinos there were confined to certain districts.
The novel reflects the hard life of a persecuted nationality in a foreign land. With no rights to own agricultural land and with the additional risks of being beaten up just for conversing with white women, Filipinos were despised on the West Coast and were treated like criminals or monkeys. With no legal recourse or organizations, Filipino workers were often exploited by the white contractors or by the Chinese and Japanese who owned the gambling establishments and whorehouses. This pattern of exploitation led many to drinking and violence, which further aggravated the hatred of their kind by the whites.
Carlos tells of the brutalities endured by Filipinos at the hands of the white community and the terrors of disease and unemployment. How many times did Carlos hear, “You’re fired!” after trying to stand up for himself and his people. In the face of all that pain, Carlos becomes involved as a labor organizer and a courageous demonstrator for the rights of exploited laborers. What’s more, he meets and is reunited with his friends and family in America over the course of the story, and he even eventually finds friendship with a Caucasian woman named Mary.
Carlos can’t join the US army like others so his choices are very limited — he can either become a gambler or a criminal, or he can settle for what limited income he can generate in menial jobs. But Carlos perseveres, he educates himself, and he even actually publishes a book of poetry. He decides not to be defeated. Carlos has serious dreams, and they enable him to win this inner struggle.
Combined with the other truths in the story, the novel is certainly wonderful in the realist tradition. Carlos is essentially ruled by his own choices, and not by his harsh environment. Though he is at times forced to steal or beat up people in order to survive, Carlos makes a conscious choice to avoid this type of behavior to educate himself and to become a writer, and this is exactly what he does. While he is at times vanquished by his environment, in the end he still makes the decision to control his own fate.
The issue of dehumanization is also very important here because this was what Carlos had to face on a day-to-day basis in nearly every situation involving people other than fellow Filipinos. Carlos is often treated like an animal by the people he encounters — he is yelled at, beaten up numerous times, called all sorts of names, and is discriminated against in nearly every dehumanizing situation, and he keenly observes the same treatment given to other Filipinos in America. These people are just scraping to get by, whether by selling bootleg liquor like Carlos, his brother Amado, becoming robbers like his acquaintance Max, or working menial jobs.
All his efforts to help his people initially fail with both the unionization movement and calls for American citizenship fizzling out. He certainly could have chosen to simply give up, ending his remaining days drinking himself to death or gambling, hanging out with prostitutes, or working in degrading menial jobs; but he doesn’t give up.
The last part of the book relates Carlos Bulosan’s experiences in trying to organize the Filipino labor movement, and his intellectual emergence as a writer. Throughout this part, Carlo regains his faith in America and meets more people also fighting for Filipinos. He reads about uneducated people writing the story of their people and their struggles. America eventually becomes part of Carlos through his struggles and eventual successes in this vast, complex country. He wants desperately to help America grow into the country he knows it could be, and he sacrifices so much for America. His hopes are contained within America, and so he realizes that America is also contained within him and his heart.
He so eloquently celebrates the heroic spirit of migrant workers who travel far to find their dream country. His failed quest yields a book powered by a dream society.
America is in the Heart beautifully recounts the pain faced by countless laborers who arrive in the United States to earn for their families back home. Many of the passages in the book read like poetry, yet they also remain very accessible to many of us ordinary people for whom the plight of migrant workers is a fairly foreign concept. One of the most compelling issues brought up in the book is gender discrimination. I admire the clarity and honesty of the writing, how he shares his harrowing yet ultimately inspiring experiences.
This book was written in good faith and with uncommon courage and I would like someday to have a life that can be an inspiring saga of struggle and victory over hardship.
