Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, first published in 1943 and then in 1946, details the memories and experiences of a young immigrant from the Philippines. Bulosan’s travel narrative recounts the difficulties of his childhood in provincial Philippines, the causes of his immigration to the United States, and finally the hardships and violence Filipino migrant workers encountered there.
The novel is candid in its descriptions and discussion of poverty, violence, and death. However, the narrator contrasts these images with an abiding sense of hope and a belief in the American Dream. The result is a “semi-autobiographical” novel that is strong in its imagery, its commentary on racism, class differences, and the tensions between various immigrant groups that still resonate today.
Part 1 of the novel is first set in the barrio of Mangusmana, in the town of Binalonan, in the province of Pangasinan (Northern Luzon). The first-person narrator, Carlos, nicknamed Allos, sees his brother Leon coming home from fighting World War I in Europe. The family, happy for Leon’s safe return, helps him prepare for his wedding. All goes well until the wedding night, when everyone in the barrio finds out that Leon’s new wife is not a virgin. Violence ensues, setting a tone for the poverty, misery, and tragedy Allos witnesses throughout his life.
He and his family eke out a meager existence as subsistence farmers, selling what little they can at market. Allos comments on the exploitation of these farmers by wealthier landlords, or hacienderos, and large corporations. He knows of revolts that take place against the richer entities, and the bloody suppression of these revolts. Allos’s father struggles to keep his land and eventually loses it to one of the faceless entities in Manila. Allos is acutely aware of his father’s humiliation at first losing his land and then having to hire himself out as a laborer. The struggle for land rights, both in the Philippines and in the United States, is a large theme in Bulosan’s novel.
Attempting to find more work, Allos travels between Mangusmana and Baguio City, a larger, more cosmopolitan city. Here, he gains exposure to affluent Europeans and Americans. Allos meets an American librarian named Mary Strandon, who introduces the young man to library books and to Abraham Lincoln, a poor boy who eventually becomes president of the United States. Lincoln becomes the role model for whom Allos has been looking. He also refers to writer Richard Wright, noting that as a Negro, Wright was barred from borrowing books from the library. As a brown man, Allos also knows his access to a library could be restricted at any time, so he reads the books voraciously.
Because of his family’s toil, Allos finally makes the decision to go to the United States to pursue what he hopes will be a better life. He journeys to Manila, waiting, like many Filipinos, for passage to Honolulu. In Manila, he is exposed to the violence and victimization resulting from abject poverty, from bloody cockfights to prostitution. His last image of the big city is of a woman prostituting her daughter for money. He sails from Manila with a heavy heart, already missing his family and his good recollections of home.
As Allos departs for the United States, he seeks out other Filipinos to feel unity and comfort against the harsh racism that awaits them in the new country. Bulosan’s narrative style is episodic, showing how Allos meets many different women and men—some who disappear from his life, never to be seen again, and others who enter and reenter his life periodically. He travels all over the West Coast picking fruit and vegetables, and working as a dishwasher and fish canner. The work is hard, yet Allos observes that the money he earns is more than what he earned in the Philippines.
As he travels, he runs into many of his compatriots and learns very quickly of the insidious division and infighting that make all the Filipinos’ lives precarious in the United States. He observes other immigrant groups—for example, some of the Chinese—taking advantage of newly arrived immigrants. Other immigrants are hospitable, giving food and shelter whenever they can. Allos learns the dark side of survival: at times he is ruthless; at other times he is empathetic, trying to keep his humanity as both victim and witness to disease, accidents, and criminal activity.
Because of the exploitation, several of the migrant workers, including Allos, try to organize unions. The socialist actions are at times successful and at other times suppressed by those who own the fields, orchards, and companies. Allos uses his talent for writing as a way of fighting for worker dignity. He participates in the social struggle that began with the injustices he experienced as a farm boy in the Philippines.
In Part 2, Bulosan shows how literature functions for social change. Allos writes articles for various magazines, emphasizing the existence of fragile unions like the Filipino Workers’ Association. He also experiences conflict among the different nationalities as Mexican and Filipino workers compete. He tells of the infiltration and betrayal of spies who attempt to weaken the young unions. One in particular, Helen, is exposed by Allos and his fellow union organizers, but only after she foils various strikes. Soon after, Allos discovers he has tuberculosis.
Undaunted by illness, Allos (Carlos) continues to write and to cultivate his relationships with other writers and editors who contribute their knowledge and experiences to help not only the migrant workers, but to improve the lot of all the poor. He discovers that other writers across the world are impassioned by the same social forces that drive him to write. His literary influences include Russian writers—Nikolay Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky—and other Europeans such as Sean O’Casey and Federico García Lorca. He also mentions their American counterparts: Jack London, Mark Twain, and William Saroyan, who write about the struggles of the poor and outcast against natural and societal oppressors.
Allos fights for unionization and Filipino rights through emergent fascism in Europe and later, through the bombing of Pearl Harbor and World War II.
Critics often discuss the importance of land and social reform in America Is in the Heart. Other topics include gender politics in the novel. Articles on the novel discuss both emasculation and “hyper-sexual” stereotypes of Filipino men and the “threat” felt by white men of “taking” away white women. Other critics analyze rape, other types of victimization, and idealization of women characters in the novel. The novel’s study of Allos’s experiences of poverty, racism within and outside of cultural groups, and violence is detailed and often bleak, but it shows hope thriving in a young man who continues to educate himself and writes for what he believes.
Sources
Cheung, Kingkok, ed. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, 312–337. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Chu, Patricia P. Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996.
Morantte, P. C. Remembering Carlos Bulosan. Quezon City, the Philippines: New Day, 1984.
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