Biographical research paper
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Carlos Bulosan Born: Binalonan, Pangasinan, Luzon, Philippines; November 2, 1911 Died: Seattle, Washington; September 11, 1956
Bulosan was the first Filipino writer to have a major impact on American literature, and his America Is in the Heart has become an important model for the ethnobiographies that followed his work throughout the twentieth century.
Biography Carlos Bulosan emigrated to the United States from his native Philippines in 1930. Like count- less other young men who had been driven to the United States by the promise of better jobs, Bu- losan found instead the crushing defeats of the worst economic depression in U.S. history. The story of his struggles during the 1930’s and early 1940’s, chronicled in the autobiographical Amer- ica Is in the Heart (1946), had a profound impact on ethnic writing after it was republished by the University of Washington Press in 1973.
It is difficult to piece together Bulosan’s real life story, in part because his most important lit- erary legacy is itself a creative mix of fact and fic- tion. Even the basic outline of his life is in some dispute: Scholars disagree about the date of his birth, the date and location of his death, and his age when he died. What is known is that he was born in the village of Mangusmana, near Binalo- nan (in Pangasinan province, on the island of Luzon) in the Philippines and was one of several children. Like many rural Filipino families at that time, his parents suffered economic hardship due in part to U.S. colonialism. He completed only three years of schooling and, drawn to the Unit- ed States by the promises of wealth and education and the dream of becoming a writer, he followed two older brothers and purchased a steerage tick- et to Seattle for seventyfive dollars, arriving on July 22, 1930, while still a teenager.
He would never return to the Philippines, and he would never become an American citizen. He worked at a series of low-paying jobs in an Alaskan fish cannery and as a fruit and vegetable picker in Washington and California. Conditions in the ear-
ly 1930’s were miserable for all migrant workers (as documented in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath) but particularly for Filipinos (then called “Pinoys”) such as Bulosan, and he ex- perienced racial discrimination and poverty. How- ever, he slowly improved his English, befriended other immigrant laborers suffering similar condi- tions, and soon was writing for and editing union and immigrant papers such as New Tide. He also became involved in organizing workers and, with his Filipino friend Chris Mensalves, formed the union that would later become the United Can- nery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA).
Never a healthy man, Bulosan was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1936, and he spent the next several years in Los Angeles General Hospital, un- dergoing surgeries and convalescence. He used his time productively, however; he later claimed that he read a book a day, many by the classic authors of American literature, including Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway. He never abandoned his early dream of becoming a writer and soon was publish- ing poetry and essays. By the early 1940’s, he was gaining national recognition.
In 1942, he published his first book of po- ems, Letter from America, and The Voice of Bataan was published the following year. Also in 1943, the Saturday Evening Post commissioned articles on the Four Freedoms, and Bulosan was paid one thousand dollars for “Freedom from Want,” an essay that was illustrated in the magazine by the famous artist Norman Rockwell. Stories, poems, and essays by Bulosan began to appear during the early 1940’s in magazines such as Town and
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Country, Harper’s Bazaar, and Poetry. Bulosan’s first collection of stories, The Laughter of My Father, was published in 1944 and was broadcast around the world to American troops fighting in World War II; it soon became a best seller.
In 1946, Harcourt Brace published America Is in the Heart, which also became popular, but Bu- losan’s career was already beginning to falter, in part because of two factors beyond his control. In 1944, he had published a short story, “The End of the War,” in The New Yorker, and he was accused of plagiarism by another writer. The charges were never proven, but the claim and the publicity it aroused damaged Bulosan’s career. Perhaps more important, the end of World War II saw the rise of anticommunist hysteria in the United States, peaking in the early 1950’s with the witch hunts of the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Bulosan was investigated for his 1930’s union activities and eventually—like many other important American writers—blacklisted. During this time, Bulosan was back in Seattle working as a labor editor but was in poor health. On September 11, 1956, he died of tuberculosis and is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in the city’s Queen Anne Hill neighborhood. He was originally buried in an un- marked pauper’s grave, but, since 1982, his grave has been marked with a black granite headstone erected by admirers of the Filipino labor organiz- er and writer.
Bulosan wrote other books, including novels, but most of his later works were published posthu- mously by scholars who went through his papers and assembled individual titles. E. San Juan, Jr., has been responsible for many of these volumes, including The Philippines Is in the Heart: A Collection of Short Stories (1978), On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan (1995), and The Cry and the Dedication (historical fiction, 1995), a novel set in the Philippines during and after World War II.
Analysis While debate about Bulosan’s life continues to exist, the importance both of his career and par- ticularly of America Is in the Heart is clear. In this fictional immigrant narrative, he combined fact and myth to create an ethnobiography of his peo- ple’s experience in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. He fictionalized
much of his own life in the story but was true to the oppression and discrimination that he and his fellow Filipino immigrants experienced dur- ing the 1930’s. Unlike the authors of ethnic au- tobiographies that had been produced in earlier waves of immigration (such as the Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie or The Americanization of Edward Bok, both published in 1920), Bulosan stressed the class struggle which he saw played out in his own life and created a counterpoint to the standard American Dream portrayed in such works. The result is a powerful story which tells of his own life and that of his people from an anti-imperialist and working-class perspective.
Bulosan’s other works have broadened his rep- utation, but America Is in the Heart remains the book by which he will be best remembered. Like other Asian American fiction (written by, for ex- ample, Amy Tan and Gish Jen), it explores a num- ber of ethnic issues, including the theme of dual identity—the conflict between the protagonist’s roots in an ethnic community and culture and the character’s search for an individual identity. Furthermore, like a number of classic American works, from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), America Is in the Heart is also the story of a journey of selfdiscovery. The narrator witnesses countless instances of violence and discrimination but by the end of the story comes to an understanding of himself and of the country he has chosen as his own. Like a number of works from the 1930’s (not only that of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, but also the novels of writers such as Jack Conroy and John Dos Passos), the book depicts life at its most miserable during the worst economic depression in American history.
Many ethnic American literary works have un- covered an American history that the dominant culture has arguably ignored, including slavery, the extermination of Native American tribes, and the expropriation of Mexican lands. Bulosan’s work amplifies two important aspects of these ig- nored topics, first exposing what U.S. imperialism meant in the Philippines in the early years of the twentieth century and then what further injustices befell the victims of that imperialism who fled to the United States looking for its fabled riches. In the first part of America Is in the Heart and in nu- merous short stories and the later novel The Cry
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and the Dedication, Bulosan writes about his home- land and what has happened to it as a result of American intervention, beginning with the Span- ish-American War in 1898. Moreover, in much of Bulosan’s works, including the remaining four parts of America Is in the Heart and his short stories and essays, to say nothing of the trajectory of his own career, Bulosan documents how he and his fellow Filipinos have been systematically mistreat- ed and brutalized in the American land of prom- ise. Few ethnic writers can ignore their history, but Bulosan lived his and wrote about it almost obsessively.
America Is in the Heart First published: 1946 Type of work: Autobiographical novel
Allos emigrates from his native Philippines in 1930 and spends a decade working as a migrant laborer up and down the West Coast before finding his calling as a labor organizer and writer.
Carey McWilliams, who wrote a classic study of migrant farm labor in California titled Factories in the Field (1939), also wrote the introduction to the University of Washington reprint of America Is in the Heart, the paperback which brought Bulosan’s work back into national literary consciousness. McWilliams called the book “a social classic” that “reflects the collective life experience of thou- sands of Filipino immigrants who were attracted to this country by its legendary promises of a better life or who were recruited for employment here.” The work must thus be read on multiple levels at the same time: as a greatly fictionalized memoir or life story but perhaps even more important, as a study of Filipino immigration—which in turn is also part novel, part autobiography.
The work is divided into four parts. In part 1, the narrator (named “Allos”) describes his life in rural Luzon following World War I, when his brother Leon returns from service. His family is slowly disintegrating under multiple economic pressures, as absentee landlords are crippling the peasant farming economy, and eventually Allos is sent to the city to work. However, the perspec- tive is not that of a young boy: Bulosan is clearly
looking back as a writer in the United States. This adult narrator understands the exploitation of the peasants by landowners and the church and sees that radical social change is on the horizon. (The parallels to the events on the West Coast—the la- bor organizing and strikes—in the 1930’s of part 2 are clear.) Part 1 ends with Allos standing on the deck of the ship that will take him to the United States “and looking toward the disappearing Phil- ippines” that he will never see again.
Part 2 focuses largely on the racial discrimi- nation and violence that Filipinos and other mi- norities experienced in the United States. Allos arrives in Seattle with twenty cents, he says, and he is immediately exploited by a Filipino labor con- tractor who sells him to the fish canneries in Alaska. “It was the beginning of my life in America, the begin- ning of a long flight that carried me down the years, fighting des- perately to find peace in some corner of life.” His “pilgrimage, this search for a door into America,” takes him instead through a world of gamblers and prostitutes, brutality and bestiality, and disorientation and oppression. He travels south in search of work and comes to realize “that in many ways it was a crime to be a Fil- ipino in California. I came to know that the public streets were not free to my people. . . .” Bulosan relates a series of awful stories in this section, of hunger and pain, poverty and loneliness, racism and exploitation. Unlike the traditional American rags-to-riches story (compare Benjamin Franklin’s Auto Biography from 1793, and the story of how he arrived in Philadelphia with only pennies and within weeks had found friendship and success), Bulosan’s story in this second part is an almost unremitting tale of violence and persecution. His “flight” here has taken him to a “crossroads” in his life journey, and he commits himself to broadcast his experience and organize his people.
Part 3 documents Bulosan’s intellectual awak- ening. He becomes part of the labor movement,
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participates in a strike, and starts writing for New Tide. Just as he is beginning this activist role, however, he is diagnosed with tuberculosis and hospitalized. Yet, despite his illness, his “insatia- ble hunger for knowledge and human affection” begins to be satisfied. Several white women help him get books—he claims he reads a book a day, “including Sundays”—and encourage his literar y ambitions. Throughout the work, Bulosan identi- fies with Robinson Crusoe and his castaway lone- liness, but Bulosan’s sur vival was possible only because of the various communities, both white and Filipino, that he found or forged in his new home.
In the short, concluding part 4, he continues to detail the writers who are influencing him— Younghill Kang, John Fante, Louis Adamic (all, like Bulosan, ethnic authors who wrote about their life journeys)—and to describe his organ- izing activities as his radical consciousness grows. He also begins to write in the same period that the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and World War II begins in the United States. Bulosan concludes his narrative with a song of praise to an America that the text itself seems to deny: “the American earth was like a huge heart unfolding warmly to receive me. . . . It came to me that no man . . . could destroy my faith in America again.”
The contradictions within America Is in the Heart are everywhere. At the same time operating as both history and fiction, a work that praises Amer- ica at the very moment that it is describing its mul- tiple injustices, the book is a perfect metaphor for the paradox of America itself—its possibilities and cruelties. As a number of scholars have pointed out, the story fictionalizes much of Bulosan’s life; on one hand, he came from a better-off family in the Philippines than Allos, and on the other, given his frail health, he could never have worked all the arduous jobs he describes Allos undertaking on the West Coast. The book is, however, true to his ethnic life story and is an accurate collective biography of the first wave of Filipino immigra- tion to America, where exploitation and discrim- ination were the rule. Its theme thus places it in the mainstream tradition of American autobiog- raphy, from Benjamin Franklin through to Young- hill Kang (East Goes West: The Making of an Orien- tal Yankee, 1937), as a story of someone who will, against almost insurmountable odds, overcome
the obstacles thrown in his path. The two clos- est comparisons, however, are Depression-based autobiographies: Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930) and Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945). Like both these writers, Bulosan fictionalizes his experience and blurs the distinctions between fact and myth. Moreover, also like these authors, he tells a story of internal exile, of living in America and drawn to its dreams and yet feeling separated from real participation in American life.
Summary Carlos Bulosan’s career has been unique in American literature. An ethnic writer who found fame before most others, he fell into obscurity, died young, and was rediscovered when the re- cover y of ethnic American literature accelerated in the last decades of the twentieth centur y. Amer- ica Is in the Heart came to be considered a major work in the Asian American literar y canon, but that is where agreement ends. Part myth, fiction, and histor y, America Is in the Heart puzzles crit- ics, for it breaks the genre boundaries that schol- ars are usually intent on establishing. Still, the work remains Bulosan’s most important legacy, a powerful retelling of one important chapter in Asian American histor y, what the critic Elaine Kim has called “a composite portrait of the Fil- ipino American community, a social document from the point of view of a participant in that experience,” and what E. San Juan, Jr., consid- ers “a massive documentation of the varieties of racism, exploitation, alienation, and inhumanity suffered by Filipinos in the West Coast and Alas- ka in the decade beginning with the Depression and extending to the outbreak of World War II.” Carlos Bulosan will hold his place in American literature as long as this countr y’s rich multieth- nic histor y is celebrated.
David Peck
Bibliography By the Author
long fiction: The Power of the People, 1986 The Cry and the Dedication, 1995 (E. San Juan, Jr.,
editor) All the Conspirators, 1998
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short fiction: The Laughter of My Father, 1944 The Philippines Is in the Heart: A Collection of Stories,
1978 If You Want to Know What We Are: A Carlos Bulosan Reader, 1983 (E. San Juan, Jr., editor) The Power of Money, and Other Stories, 1990 On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan, 1995 (San Juan, Jr., editor)
poetry: Letter from America, 1942 The Voice of Bataan, 1943 Now You Are Still, and Other Poems, 1990
nonfiction: America Is in the Heart, 1946 Sound of Falling light: Letters in Exile, 1960
miscellaneous: Bulosan: An Introduction with Selections, 1983
(compiled by E. San Juan, Jr.)
edited text: Chorus for America: Six Philippine Poets, 1942
About the Author Campomanes, Oscar V. “Filipinos in the United
States and Their Literature of Exile.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.
Evangelista, Susan. Carlos Bulosan and His Poetry: A Biography and an Anthology. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1985.
Kim, Elaine. Asian-American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.
Libretti, Tim. “America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan.” In A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, edited by Sau-long Cynthia Wong and Stephen H. Sumida. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001.
Morantte, P. C. Remembering Carlos Bulosan: His Heart Affair with America. Quezon City: New Day, 1984. San Juan, E., Jr. Bulosan: An Introduction with Selections. Manila: National Book Store, 1983. _______. Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle. Quezon City: University of the Philippines
Press, 1972.
Discussion Topics • How does the narrator of Carlos Bulosan’s
America Is in the Heart find his own identi- ty?
• Which institutions (the church, the po- lice, and so on) help his growth? Which ones hinder it?
• List all the incidents of violence, cruelty, and racial discrimination in the novel. What patterns do they reveal?
• Is this a story of assimilation into the American mainstream? How so?
• Where does Allos finally find community? Who helps him the most?
• Compare this work with other books about writers coming of age, such as James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). What do they have in common?
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