Biographical research paper

© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2008 DOI 10.1179/147757008X280786

comparative american studies, vol. 6, No. 2, June 2008, 123–143

Internationalizing the US Ethnic Canon: Revisiting Carlos Bulosan E San Juan, JR Philippine Forum, New York City, USA

The quasi-autobiographical writing of Carlos Bulosan, a migrant farmworker from the US colony of the Philippines from the 1930s to the 1950s, was discovered by ethnic activists during the US Civil Rights struggles. Once adopted as canonical texts in the US academy from the 1980s on, Bulosan’s radical edge was blunted in critical readings of his work, his subversive tendencies sanitized to promote a conformist multiculturalism. We need to recover a submerged decolonizing strand in the history of Filipino deraci- nation, sedimented in Bulosan’s testimonies. This essay seeks to excavate those oppositional impulses in Bulosan’s works by re-contextualizing them in the anti-colonial revolutionary movement of Filipinos dating back to the revolution of 1896; to the Filipino-American War together with the peasant insurgencies during the fi rst three decades of US occupation (1899–1935); and in the popular-front mobilization during the US Great Depression up to the onset of the Cold War. Re-situated in their historical-biographical milieu and geopolitical provenance, Bulosan’s oeuvre acquires immediacy and resonance.

keywords Bulosan, Philippines, Filipino–American War; Anti-Colonialism; Organic Intellectual

‘Go out into the world and live, Allos. I will never see you again. But remember the

song of our birds in the morning, the hills of home, the sound of our language.’ What a

beautiful thing to say to a young man going away! The sound of our language! It means

my roots in this faraway soil; it means my only communication with the living and those

who died without a gift of expression. My dear brother, I remember the song of the birds

in the morning, the hills of home, the sound of the language [. . .]

Carlos Bulosan

When the Bush administration made the fateful decision in March 2003 to invade Iraq

after its incursion into Afghanistan in the wake of 11 September 2001, the Philippines

— its only colony in Asia for over a century — became the second battlefront in the

global war against terrorism. US ‘Special Troops’ landed in the southern region of

124 E SAN JUAN, JR

the country (Mindanao and Sulu) hunting for Al-Qaeda-linked Muslims called the

‘Abu Sayyaf’. Up to last year, 2006, which offi cially marks the centennial anniversary

of the arrival in US territory of the fi rst twenty-fi ve natives from its new colonial

possession, US troops were still actively intervening in what is basically an internal

civil war in a neocolonial theater of confl ict (San Juan, 2007b; Aquino, 2005).

The current crisis in the Philippines, characterized by unprecedented extrajudicial

political killings and forced ‘disappearances’ carried out by State agents backed

by Washington/the Pentagon, thus cannot be understood without keeping in mind the

continuing involvement of the former colonial power in the affairs of 89 million

Filipinos, three million of whom have settled in the US as part of a Filipino diaspora

of ten million distributed around the world.

The Philippines was acquired as one of the spoils (together with Puerto Rico and

Cuba) of the Spanish-American War at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth

century. One may speculate that the twenty-fi ve dark-skinned ‘subalterns’ (as some

postcolonialists would now categorize them), fi rst recruited by the Hawaiian Sugar

Planters Association, may have been veterans of the Filipino-American War of 1899–

1902, America’s ‘fi rst Vietnam’, which killed more than 8,000 American soldiers

and 1.4 million Filipinos (Schirmer and Shalom, 1987: 19). Today, approximately

three million Filipinos constitute the largest of the Asian American immigrant group

originating from one nation-state, the Republic of the Philippines, which is also

perhaps the biggest exporter of low-paid migrant contract workers (chiefl y female

domestics) to all the continents (Takaki, 1989: 432; Beltran and Rodriguez, 1996; San

Juan, 2007a).

Apart from the pioneering efforts of now forgotten chroniclers like Carey

McWilliams and Emory Bogardus, only one Filipino among several thousands —

Carlos Bulosan — succeeded in capturing in expressive form the ordeals and trau-

matic experiences of Filipino workers (called the ‘Manongs’ in the West Coast and

Hawaii) in the United States in the fi rst half of the last century. This is itself a reveal-

ing symptom of the transition from classic colonial underdevelopment to neocolonial

marginality. Although elevated to the status of a ‘politically correct’ ethnic icon by

the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Bulosan’s position as an authoritative

‘spokesperson’ of this expatriated, deracinated community — now mainly ‘middle-

class’ after the 1965 relaxation of immigration law — has always been precarious

from the start, contingent on the vitality of the progressive social movements

that inspired his own singular artistic development (Solberg, 1991; San Juan, 1995).

Today, many doubt if Bulosan’s ‘message’ is still relevant or meaningful for

thousands of Filipinos working in the Las Vegas casinos or in the care-giver industry

of Florida, California, and other states. With the decline of labor insurgency during

the Cold War and the predominance of the neoconservative ethos of the last decades,

we can now begin to take a critical, skeptical look at the way the formation of the

academically-sanctioned ‘Bulosan’ may have contributed to the demobilization, if not

defusing, of the radically subversive energies immanent in the subterranean folds of

the author’s ‘unread’ texts. Pluralist Eurocentric assimilationism begets its opposite:

the quest for national, localizing singularity as a stage in the process of regaining

a destroyed historical specifi city and universality (Lowy, 1998). An attempt to inter-

nationalize — that is, to re-situate in the context of US-Philippines asymmetrical

interstate dynamics — Bulosan’s genealogy as a producer of historically determinate

125REVISITING CARLOS BULOSAN

texts might help us understand the nature of scholastic canon-making in the putative

US multicultural archive and hopefully recover its original democratizing, emancipa-

tory impulse. This is an integral part of the project of national liberation of the

oppressed and exploited Filipino masses in this post-9/11 era of corporate-directed

globalization.

It will be fi fty-one years since Carlos Bulosan died in Seattle, Washington, on

11 September 1956. But up to now we have not settled the real year of his birth,

whether 1911, 1913, or 1914. Commentaries on his work abound, but a defi nitive

biography is still needed. Susan Evangelista’s pioneering effort in this regard is

valuable for suggesting what more needs to be done: a temporally differentiated

remapping of Bulosan’s intellectual itinerary or genealogy. What is certain is that

Bulosan has become canonized; his 1946 testimonio called American is in the Heart

(AIH; originally entitled ‘In Search of America’) is celebrated as a classic ur-text of

the Asian-American and, more specifi cally, Filipino American experience. Because

Bulosan is now required reading for thousands of college students and an icon for

Filipino Americans, he is in danger of becoming regarded as an allergy or aversion.

Like Jose Rizal, the national hero, Bulosan is in danger of becoming ‘inutile’,

taken for granted, and museumifi ed as a literary ‘high priest’ or monumental anito

(ancestor). Which triggers the cynical quip: so what else is new?

I

First, a qualifi ed mea culpa. In hindsight I am perhaps chiefl y to blame for having

started a trend when the University of the Philippines Press published in 1972

my Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle, the fi rst book-length

commentary on his major texts. Subsequently I edited the fi rst anthology of Bulosan’s

writings as a special issue of Amerasia Journal (May 1979) and his only extant novel,

The Power of the People (1977; originally titled The Cry and the Dedication,

hereafter The Cry), which was issued by Tabloid Books in Ontario, Canada, and

subsequently by National Bookstore in 1986. This was followed by a volume of

unpublished stories, The Philippines is in the Heart (published in 1978 in Quezon

City, Philippines), most of which were excluded from The Laughter of My Father

(hereafter The Laughter). By the time the next collection of his works — On

Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan (Temple University Press)

came out in 1995, Bulosan was already a canonical author, included in Paul Lauter’s

Heath Anthology of American Literature and in assorted other readers. This sums up

my complicity with the canonizing orthodoxy.

Whatever the claims of others, however, a great debt is owed to the late Dolores

Feria, a life-long friend of Bulosan. Aside from several insightful commentaries on

Bulosan, Feria edited the indispensable selection of Bulosan’s letters, Sound of Falling

Light (1960); her effort to publicize his works and call attention to the plight of

Bulosan’s compatriots remains unacknowledged and in fact unconscionably forgot-

ten. Let me then rectify here this ‘sin’ of omission. Meanwhile, when the Filipino

youth movement burst into the scene inspired by the Civil Rights movement in the

late 1960s and ripened into the anti-martial law movement from 1972 up to 1986,

Bulosan’s AIH (reprinted in 1973 by the University of Washington Press) was already

126 E SAN JUAN, JR

being quoted in Filipino community newspapers, programs, forums, and ethnic

festivals. I understand that AIH has gone through fi fteen printings and is selling at

least 4000 copies every year. And yet, especially in the last two decades, I have met

many Filipinos and Filipino Americans who have never heard of Bulosan nor read

any of his now acclaimed works. It now seems a sign of idiosyncratic atavism or

retrogression to be caught reading Bulosan in this ‘war-on-terrorism’ epoch.

One truth cannot be doubted: the changes in the political and social milieu from

the 1930s to the 1950s here and internationally, in particular the relations between

the Philippines and the United States, will explain to a large extent the position,

meaning, and signifi cance of Bulosan’s writings — why they were forgotten immedi-

ately after coming out, why they were rediscovered and acquired new signifi cance,

and why they have become institutionalized and rendered ‘safe’. This is the task of a

historical-materialist hermeneutics and epistemology. Lest I be charged for being

guilty, or at least complicit, for the direction being taken in the unpredictable recep-

tion of Bulosan’s texts, and also in fear of repeating myself, I take this occasion to

speculate on possible answers to these questions and, by implication, to the vicissi-

tudes of the Filipino presence in the United States — only one part of the ten-million

strong Filipino diaspora on this planet. I also attempt here, as a prolegomenon,

to expound a transnational poetics, between the hegemonic metropolis and the

subalternized dependency.

I begin with actuality sutured to potentiality — to use Charles Sanders Peirce’s

terminology (see Merrell, 1997). On the seventy-fi fth anniversary of his arrival

in Seattle on 22 July 1930, a news report in the News Tribune (quoted in Estrada,

2005) juxtaposed two items that signify two themes often replicated in response to

Bulosan’s life and work. First, a quotation from a letter dated 27 April 1941: ‘Yes, I

feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit. And the crime

is that I am a Filipino in America’ (1995: 173). And second, Bulosan’s essay about

‘Freedom from Want’, published in the Saturday Evening Post (6 March 1943) and

displayed in a federal building in San Francisco. The lesson at fi rst seems unam-

biguous: despite suffering and disillusionment, Bulosan’s was a success story. He

personifi ed the platitudinous tale of the migrant quasi-sojourner/exile-become-famous

public personality. Yet there was an unexpected turn: we are told that ‘his star

faded, he returned to Seattle to do organizing and publicity work for Local 37 of the

International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU)’. So how the twist

of the plot happened, what accident intervened in complicating the web of necessity,

needs to be spelled out.

As in any news report, the gaps and lacunae shape the form and substance of what

we read. What is puzzling to me is surely of interest to many: up to now, no one,

least of all our highly credentialed ethnic studies experts, seems to have asked

the simple, obvious but seemingly intractable question: why and how did Bulosan

become a writer, specifi cally the producer of such texts as The Laughter, AIH, stories

such as ‘As Long As the Grass Shall Grow’, The Cry (as for the recently found All

the Conspirators, I am doubtful that this is a genuine Bulosan text, so discrepant is

the style, tone, and structuring of the materials). And, by extrapolation, how did these

lead to all the critical glosses and inquiries occasioned by Bulosan’s high reputation

as the author of poems, essays, stories, novels, letters, and so on?

127REVISITING CARLOS BULOSAN

Allos (short for ‘Carlos’) — let us call him by the name of the protagonist in the

sketch ‘Passage Into Life’ — became a writer by accident, by force of circumstance

and necessity. In the middle of AIH, after surviving much adversity fi ghting racist

white men, Allos stops at a hotel in San Luis Obispo, California, and composes a

letter to his brother Macario: ‘Then it came to me, like a revelation, that I could

actually write understandable English. I was seized with happiness [. . .] When the

long letter was fi nished, a letter which was actually a story of my life, I jumped to

my feet and shouted through my tears: “They can’t silence me any more! I’ll tell the

world what they have done to me!”’ (1982: 180). Two motives are intertwined here:

the need to communicate with kin, a part of the family, becomes also the means to

break the silence of subalternity, to act and strike back. It is a mode of decolonizing

body and psyche. Achieving solidarity, fraternal communication, is part of the

process of liberating oneself from the necessity imposed by a complex conjuncture of

political and economic forces, by the deterritorializing vectors of history. It embodies

the dialectic of the personal and the collective, the punctual and the epochal. In short,

Allos began writing as an act of rebellion against the condition he was born into,

against the circumstances and exigencies he shared with others.

One cannot understand this conjunction of forces by refusing to read the narrative

of AIH integrally, in its composite whole. Most commentators of this synoptic

life-history, disturbed by the masochistic irony of a narrator proclaiming faith in

America while being beaten up and mutilated, focus on this dissonance and allied

incongruities. They usually set aside Part I, chapters 1–12, unable to connect the

colonial subordination of the peasant, the forcible maintenance of feudal/patriarchal

despotism, and the landscape of isolation, violence, and solidarity with the way this

all leads to an affi rmation of democratic ideals in the face of fascism and imperial

aggression in the Philippines (San Juan, 1996). This failure is a symptom of either

academic ignorance, or, most likely, a cultivated blindness: ignorance of US racial

supremacy hidden behind American exceptionalism and blindness to Filipino aspira-

tions for freedom and national independence. This viewpoint separates off US racist

expansionism from the colonial subjugation of Filipinos by the whole machinery of

Anglo-Saxon white supremacy. The long and durable history of Filipino resistance to

three hundred years of Spanish domination and then to US aggression from 1899 to

1915, and thereafter — the Tayug uprising described by Allos is an insurrection

against US rule and its local agents, the quasi-feudal landlords — underwrites in

a profound, intimate way the subterranean currents of revolt in Allos and his

compatriots. These same currents motivated union organizing with the CIO in the

mid-1930s, heightening the worldwide solidarity movement amongst Spanish

republican forces combating fascism, and feeding the passionate drive to free the

homeland from the savage terror of Japanese imperialism.

We can no longer shirk the imperative of an integrative or synthesizing mode of

critical evaluation and ethical judgment. I hazard to state here that any scholarly

comment on Bulosan, or any Filipino writer for that matter, that elides the enduring

impact — the forcible subjugation and the resistance to it — of US colonial domina-

tion of the Philippines is bound to be partial, inadequate, and ultimately useless.

And so I am constantly surprised at the recurrent mistake of scholars equating the

128 E SAN JUAN, JR

repressed ‘nationalism’ of subordinated Filipino ‘wards’ (voiced by the chief pro-

tagonist of AIH) with American nationalism or imperial chauvinism; these two are

worlds apart. It seems an unforgivable error, at this late date, to confuse superpower

nationalist jingoism with the ‘nationalist’ impulses of the subjugated natives. Even

though they throw around words like ‘capitalism’ or ‘colonialism’, these latter-day

cosmopolitanists cannot distinguish the disparity, nor really appreciate the fl agrant

parasitic relation, between colonial master and subjugated nationality. Of course,

for hegemonic reasons, that is what we habitually get; and rare are the exceptions,

depending on the climate of dissent and critical awareness of the systemic crisis we

are all at present laboring under.

Allos’s plight was part of a collective predicament. All the known evidence

indicates that Allos left the subjugated territory as part of the recruitment of Filipino

labor for the sugar plantations of Hawai‘i and, later, for agribusiness in the West

Coast and the Alaskan canneries. Most of those permitted ‘nationals’ under indefi nite

tutelage, neither aliens nor citizens, were in search of an opportunity to work and

earn enough to support themselves and help their parents, brothers, and sisters back

home. Although the ‘push’ factor (to use the cliché of offi cial discourse) was

compelling, namely, the extreme poverty and brutalization of peasants in the admin-

istered possession (for a long time, the Philippines was under the Bureau of Insular

Affairs), the ‘pull’ factor identifying America as the land of promise, prosperity,

and easy success exercised its seductive power on most natives, especially desperate

peasants. This myth, of course, was exploded by the reality of experience and a

belated ‘shock of recognition’.

And so it was neither personal ambition nor dire want that made Allos a writer.

Rather, history and a body confi gured by the colonial milieu converged to lead him

by a circuitous or ‘rhizomatic’ line of fl ight (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term) to

his peculiar vocation. Consider this history: his arrival in 1930 in the depths of the

Great Depression, when 13 million people were out of work, with thousands of

homeless workers and their families foraging in garbage for food; and the way this

was punctuated by the brutal Watsonville anti-Filipino riot of 19–22 January 1930,

when ‘Flips’ were beaten up and driven out of town (Bogardus, 1976). It was the

climax of years of racist scapegoating and vigilante atrocities against immigrant

and colonized minorities. Exposure to these incidents quickly dissolved all youthful

illusions in Allos, whose search for his brothers in order to reconstitute the semblance

of family life gave a stabilizing purpose to his nomadic existence. Consider next the

breakdown of the body: in 1936 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent two

years at the Los Angeles County Hospital. He had several lung operations, lost the

ribs on his right side, and later, in the 1950s, a cancerous kidney had to be removed.

It was this physical infi rmity that prevented Allos from fulltime continuous work in

the fi elds thereafter; his period of convalescence (for two years, at least) allowed him

to read and educate himself, partly thanks to the Los Angeles Public Library, but

more to the love of two sisters, the socialist writer Sanora Babb and her indefatigable

sister, Dorothy Babb (Alice and Eileen Odell, in AIH). This was a fortuitous

encounter, equivalent to Allos’s friendship with Josephine Patrick when he moved to

Seattle, Washington, in the 1950s. Deterritorialized and dispossessed, the uprooted

native tried to reconstitute home and family in the network of communing minds,

interethnic praxis, and collaborating affections.

129REVISITING CARLOS BULOSAN

To be sure, Allos did not journey to the US to ‘complete his education and become

a writer’ (Campomanes, 1998: 113), nor even to support his parents fi nancially.

He could not do it. That might have been the result of a felicitous conjunction of

multiple causes. It was mainly the friendship of the Babb sisters that functioned

as the enabling condition for Allos to become a writer with a radical, progressive

orientation. The cultural-political setting of Los Angeles reinforced the personal

liaison between Allos and the Babb sisters, especially Dorothy (Feria, 1957), as well

as with other intellectual fellow-travelers. We do not know exactly when this friend-

ship with the sisters began, but I surmise that he made their acquaintance when he

moved within the circle of left-wing CIO labor organizers, as well as Communist

Party writers and cinema cultural producers, in Los Angeles between 1930 and 1936.

Allos’s contact with dissident intellectuals like Carey McWilliams, John Fante, and

Louis Adamic, together with his involvement in the nationwide American Committee

for the Protection of the Foreign-Born, a popular front organization campaigning for

US citizenship for Filipinos, eased his way into the pages of East Coast publications

like New Yorker, Town & Country, and Harper’s Bazaar, aside from leftist periodi-

cals like The Masses and so on. In addition, Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry

magazine, may have inspired Allos to produce, somewhat later, Letter from America

(1942), Chorus from America (1942), and Voice of Bataan (1943).

II

We learn from AIH that in the summer of 1934 Allos was involved in the Filipino

Labor Union strikes in Salinas, El Centro, Vacaville, and Lompoc. Collaborating with

Chris Mensalvas, the legendary organizer who arrived in the US in 1927, Allos and

Mensalvas edited a short-lived proletarian literary magazine, The New Tide, which

would ‘interpret the struggles and aspirations of the workers, the fi ght of sincere

intellectuals against fascism and racial oppression in concrete national terms’

(Bulosan, 1946: 199). Affi liated with Mensalvas, Allos participated in the unprece-

dented Stockton strike in 1949–1950, as well as in the activities of the United Cannery,

Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), and the

Committee for the Protection of Filipino rights. Anchored to these collective

struggles, the Bulosan Imaginary acquired ‘a local habitation and a name’.

We can cite Filipinos who resembled Allos but whose lives followed a different

trajectory. Other possible extrapolations of his life can be drawn. If Allos did not

enjoy the nurturing friendship of Dorothy Babb and was healthier, he could have

pursued the path of Chris Mensalvas and become a charismatic union organizer. If

he attempted to get a college degree and devote himself to support his family back

home and also enter the petty-bourgeois circle of Filipinos in Chicago, as did Philip

Vera Cruz, he probably would not have written AIH, The Laughter, The Cry, and

other agitprop works whose frame of intelligibility springs from the transcendence

of kinship/blood affi liation and by the exercise of a popular-democratic will to eman-

cipate the colony. Both Mensalvas and Vera Cruz, of course, carved out their own

distinguished niches in the history of Filipinos and the multiethnic proletariat in the

US. Both are Filipinos with singular vocations, but they did not write AIH, The

Laughter, nor The Cry.

130 E SAN JUAN, JR

Summing up, then, Allos became a writer not through any single act of choice,

as may be illustrated in certain episodes of AIH. Rather, it came about through

his being inscribed within what (to use Fredrick Engels’ term) may be named a

‘parallelogram’ or constellation of forces: the physical dislocation of Allos from

colonial Pangasinan in the Philippines to the metropole’s West Coast; his initiation

into the labor-capital arena of confl ict (initially through his brothers, but more

effectively through Mensalvas) and, eventually, into the intellectual-cultural milieu of

Popular Front politics (through the Babb sisters); the breakdown of his health as a

result of years of malnutrition and neglect that he shared with the Filipino peasant/

working class; and so on. In effect, the historical process of US colonial domination

of a people with a vital revolutionary tradition and the emerging resistance of citizens

and ethnic workers in the metropolitan center made Allos the kind of writer that he

was in that particular and unrepeatable conjuncture of the Thirties Depression, leftist

resurgence, united front internationalism during World War II, the Huk rebellion,

and the McCarthy period of the Cold War in the last century. In brief, he was not a

hybrid but an organic product both of his times and his creative interventions.

Does this mean Allos had no agency, nor freedom of choice? On the contrary. The

paradoxical truth stems from the proposition that the individual is really defi ned

by the totality of social relations in which she/he operates. Thus Allos’s personal

decisions acquired value, meaning, and effi cacy in consonance with the play of

the historical forces that I have enumerated, in particular the political and cultural

pressures and tendencies symbolized by organizations, discourses, and institutional

fi gures which allowed Allos’s contribution to register its distinctive signature. The

dialectical principle of self-transformation sprung from the unity of opposites (the

fusion of chance and necessity) explains Allos’s singular evolution as a Filipino

bachelor, artist, racialized scapegoat, union militant, and socialist intellectual. No

individual makes history alone, it goes without saying, except as a part of the

contradictory social groups and forces — the ‘elective affi nities’ that constitute the

map of humankind’s struggle for freedom against natural and man-made necessity.

This explains Allos’s continuing relevance.

Alone among contemporary Anglo Americanists, Michael Denning, in his

wide-ranging The Cultural Front, deploys a historical-materialist analytic to chart

and assay the exact placing of Allos’s AIH in the precarious, ever-shifting fi eld of

hegemonic contestation. Denning’s genealogy of literary forms is highly instructive;

however, he has needlessly limited himself by concentrating on AIH to the neglect of

Bulosan’s other writings. In this he shares the prevailing tendency of current scholar-

ship to virtually equate AIH with all that constitutes Bulosan and thus prejudice

any larger, more informed aesthetic or moral judgment. No wonder young Pinays

sometimes say that Bulosan is passé, obsolete and that he no longer speaks to the

hip-hop, rap gangs in Daly City, Manhattan, or elsewhere. He no longer speaks to

the volatile and ludic desire of Pinays, dreaming of becoming postmodern babaylans.

Everyone knows that the few surviving ‘Manongs’ are today an object of sanctimo-

nious nostalgia, or exoticizing charity. Even before Vera Cruz’s resignation from the

Mexican-dominated United Farmworkers of America, Filipinos have already moved

from the farms to service and care industries, some to professional-managerial

occupations, a few to bureaucratic niches. Some have been deported as suspected

131REVISITING CARLOS BULOSAN

terrorists (Beltran, 2004); others as victims of the USA Patriot Act (witness the fate

of the Cuevas family of Fremont, California) and the racialized war of the ‘civilized’

on fundamentalist Islamic terrorism.

We need a renewal of critical practice to address the changes that ever further

bifurcate Allos’s time from the present. The obsession with the melodramatic aporias

and the populist Americanism of AIH needs to be rectifi ed, for the clichés and

banalities are accumulating. In this light, I submit that the entire body of Bulosan

criticism needs to be ‘decentered’ if we are to free ourselves from stifl ing scholastic

orthodoxies and ‘model-minority’ pieties. Offi cial protocols, concepts, and tropes

need to be re-assessed and altered. There are various strategies for renewing our

critical spirits; my suggestion is only one among many. This is to ask what would our

assessment look like if we took The Cry as the pivotal center of the still-evolving

Bulosan corpus, or The Laughter as the organon of interpretive strategies, or even the

short fi ction and letters as providing the foundational criteria of judgment? Or even

the allegorical fables and pedagogical instruments such as ‘As Long as the Grass Shall

Grow’, ‘Story of a Letter’, or ‘Homecoming’, and the substantial number of stories

gathered in The Philippines Is in the Heart? We could try this experiment of

paradigm-shifting and pedagogical make-over. I am quite sure we will wake up from

our dogmatic slumber and breathe anew redemptive winds from a newly discovered

horizon of thought and moral economy of feeling, action, and hope.

We can learn much from Denning’s historical triangulation of the ‘sentimental

education’ of the writer, caught between the old world of tribal jealousies and the

new world of international solidarity against fascism. This is, indeed, a genuinely

internationalist mode of transcultural inventory. AIH certainly makes sense as a

typical Popular Front expression, with its ‘sentimental, populist, and humanist

nationalism’ qualifi ed by its ethnic particularity, manifesting generic affi nities with

Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory and Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy. But is it valid

to consider the Manongs as immigrants similar to the Irish, Italians, and so on? In

becoming a positive image, the power of the Negative has been annulled. Denning’s

Popular-Front optic assuredly invests AIH with larger political resonance. But its

fi xation on the inadequate immigrant paradigm prevents a grasp of the subversive

impulses born from the condition of exile and colonial state-lessness, emancipatory

impulses which transgress the vertigo-inducing play of differences in their drive

for contacts, linkages, affi liations, and connections. This is a recurrent mistake of

numerous ethnic-studies scholars.

AIH’s narrative’s political vision, Denning suggests, is ‘embodied in the fi gure of

the itinerant organizer’ (1997: 276–277). Let us review the background of this mediat-

ing fi gure. The Filipino worker in the US up to 1934 was considered a ‘national’, a

nomadic subaltern without citizenship rights, almost a refugee. We need to emphasize

that between the defeat of the Aguinaldo Republic (1901) and the establishment of

the Philippine Commonwealth (1935), Filipinos in the US were, strictly speaking, not

immigrants but exiles, deracinated subjects, displaced colonials, sojourners not

settlers. Their textbook label was ‘colonial wards’. Their quasi-national sovereignty

was wrested from them by US military-economic aggression and territorial annexa-

tion. About 1.4 million Filipinos died in this extension of messianic ‘Manifest Destiny’

through President McKinley’s policy of ‘Benevolent Assimilation’. This is a requisite,

132 E SAN JUAN, JR

even ineluctable, distinction. After 1935, they became full-fl edged aliens and were

subject to repatriation or deportation (McWilliams, 1997); immigration from the

Philippines was restricted to fi fty persons annually (Takaki, 1989). These are the

historical parameters for Filipino subject-position or citizenship-identifi cation in

the decades between colonial annexation in 1898 and the formal independence of the

country in 1946.

What is the consequence? Failure to recognize the colonial relationship between

the Philippines and the US, the neocolonial tie-up after 1946 and the racial-national

subordination of Filipinos leads to a marginalization of the fi rst part of AIH — that

is, the democratic struggle of peasants against feudal exploitation, and the nationalist

demand of the popular masses for sovereignty and the right of self-determination

(Chung, 1996). This is what a US-centered, liberal framework expunges from sight:

the national-popular vision that informs Allos’s work, given that the Filipino prole-

tariat still remains inchoate, without national cohesion or autonomy, unable to

realize its ethicopolitical hegemony in a specifi c social formation. The problem is not

one of representation, but one of presentation, of re-cognition and respect for

individual Filipino worth affi liated to a sovereign collectivity. Dispossessed and

dispersed, Filipinos (from Allos’s time to the present) are still in the process of

becoming — in search of a true sovereign homeland.

There is no denying that Allos was a product of his time and place. Critics have

charged him for the sexism of his fi ctional characters (Lee, 1999; Koshy, 2004). Yet

it is imperative to make the elementary discrimination between Allos the author and

the fi ctional construct, the ‘Allos’ of AIH, who, as everyone knows, is a composite

portrait of numerous Filipinos who embody varying attitudes, thoughts, patterns of

behavior, etc. Unless proof is offered, it is wise not to fuse the narrative persona, the

invented character, with the author. Trust the tale, not the author, D. H. Lawrence

counseled his readers. Allos, unfortunately, did not always anticipate this possible

confusion and its damaging consequences.

Is sexism found in the characters’ actions and thoughts? Of course. But the hetero-

sexism and the homosociality discerned in the narrative needs to be plausibly ground-

ed in their concrete historical environment, just as the close fraternal intimacy of

African slaves in the Southern plantations, or of colonized subjects in Puerto Rico,

Hawai‘i, or Cuba, needs to be inscribed in situations of extreme deprivation. While

it is true that in Allos’s time, what Koshy calls ‘commodifi cation of desire’ has

become the regulatory principle of capitalism, it is necessary to pay close attention to

the tributary or feudal social entanglements in the Philippines and the distortion

or exacerbation of these feudal bonds by the colonial US regime. Sexuality of the

Filipino colonial subject is much more complex because of the mixture of several

modes of production and their manifold layering in the fractured social formation.

Clearly, the historically derived category of ‘biopower’ and corollary notions appro-

priate for developed industrial capitalism cannot be superimposed on a backward,

uneven, feudal/comprador setting. Capitalist biopower, by defi nition, cannot function

at all inserted into a tributary kin-centered social order complicated with archaic

survivals incorporated in a distorted Christian bureaucratic setup. It is a serious

failure of judgment to impose the capitalist binary male/female sexuality on an

archaic, feudal formation such as the US-dominated Philippines then and now.

133REVISITING CARLOS BULOSAN

What postmodernist critics privilege as the valorization of semiotic differences

turns out, ironically, to be a mandate for monolithic vision and straitjacket

pronouncements. This mandate is often announced in a theater of consumption where

hedonistic lifestyle and consumerist pleasure conceal the labor that produces the

occasions and means of pleasure. Allos’s predicament lies not chiefl y in his perverted

sexuality, but in the control of his labor-power (organically tied to the dynamics

of his psyche and bodily functions) by the colonial bureaucracy and later by US

monopoly capital. Representations of intimacy, affect, libidinal fantasies, and so on,

cannot be properly assessed unless the mechanisms of reifi cation that sustain the

imperialist order are clarifi ed; but they cannot be clarifi ed if the concept of class

and the exploitation of labor are dismissed or marginalized as useless in discussing

sexuality, difference, etc., because ‘class’ is allegedly totalizing or homogenizing.

Instead of ‘class’, an abstract conception of particularity or singularity operates in

its place which prevents the understanding and appreciation of Allos’s perennial

search for community, the ‘concrete universal’ of social justice and national-popular

sovereignty.

In contrast to mainstream prejudice, I would argue the unorthodox position. What

AIH foregrounds, after muddling through undecidables and disorienting indetermin-

acies fostered by a system in which ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (using Marx’s

description of capitalism’s commodifying effects), is the centrality of class as a social

category which Filipinos and other oppressed groups can use to understand how they

can transform their condition decisively. The notion of class exploitation is more

decisive than race or sexuality because it challenges directly the power of capital.

Without a change in the mode of production, no signifi cant change in social relations,

including practices of sexuality and ethnic interactions, can be realized. Engagement

with social class (not to be construed in terms of income or status), including the

colonial condition of the Filipino workers and peasants condemned to labor in

occupied territory, leads us directly to confront the processes of material production

and the unequal division of labor, the sociohistorical reality to which the oppressive

hierarchies of gender, race, and sexual preference are anchored and legitimized, made

normal and common-sensical. Bulosan concurs with this stance in his conception of

the writer as citizen and worker, eloquently inscribed, for example, in a letter of 17

January 1955 published as ‘The writer as worker’ (Midweek, 27 July 1988) as well

as in his programmatic autobiographical sketch in the standard reference work,

Twentieth Century Authors.

This is not to privilege the past, or glorify descent, lineage or ancestral origin.

Because Filipinos are united in their shared condition of being colonized, and in the

process racialized and inferiorized across the public/private divide, the key to their

liberation is the destruction of the colonizing system, its institutions and practices,

which still prevail in diverse, altered forms. This is the goal of the project of ‘becom-

ing Filipino’ in AIH, since — amid the ruins of the homeland and the barbaric reign

of white supremacy in the metropole — the chief basis on which Filipinos can unite,

given the multiplicity of their languages and ethnic differences, is the political project

of national self-determination, the collective project of popular, democratic

sovereignty. This project (practiced, for example, by the National Democratic Front

of the Philippines and the New People’s Army) has been stigmatized and denounced

today by the high priests of the globalizing power bloc as ‘terrorist’.

134 E SAN JUAN, JR

We are Filipinos not so much because of ethnic markers, common origin, or shared

memories — they do play their integral part — but primarily because of being united

in a political project: that of liberating the Philippines (in its geographical locus and

in the diaspora) from class inequality and national bondage. A redeemed future, what

Ernst Bloch (1970) calls the reality of the ‘not-yet’, does not exist separate from the

actual movement of our minds and bodies. Allos tried to assay, in the motion of

events, the shape of an emerging future. This is the project of actualizing a ‘concrete

universal’, in which particulars fi nd their effective place within a determinate and

differentiated totality. Frankly, I do not think that postmodernist critics, trapped in

the fetishism of hybridity, infi nite substitution of signs in a ‘third space’, hyper-real

simulations, and other ‘morbid symptoms’ (to use Gramsci’s phrase) of reifi cation,

can really grasp and appreciate the value of this project as a ‘concrete universal’,

a totality that embraces multiplicity and individuality in a way that can only be

posited by the mystifi ed Allos as ‘America’, with all its unfortunate essentializing,

pejoratively utopian connotations.

III

This leads me to the task I mentioned earlier, that of shifting the center of gravity,

the Archimedean point of critique, to the post-WWII period of Allos’s career, from

1946 to 11 September 1956, and the contemporary 9/11 benchmark. This is an attempt

to defi ne what Felix Guattari calls ‘a transversalist conception of subjectivity’,

conceived as a collective ‘assemblage’ of enunciations (Guattari, 1995: 4, 127). Let us

review the historical-empirical coordinates of this career that would constitute the

fi eld of conditions from which certain inferences about the temper of his life and the

qualities of his art can be drawn:

(1) GESTATION: from 1911 to 1930, the period of youth and adolescence,

coinciding with the pacifi cation of the islands; the massacre of recalcitrant

Moros (inhabitants with an Islamic faith); the passage of the Jones Law in

1916 (following the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act) which imposed ‘free trade’ and

confi ned the Philippines to feudal-agricultural status.

(2) EMERGENCE: from 1930 to 1946, the period of apprenticeship and maturity,

ushering Allos into the Depression metropole; a series of anti-Filipino riots;

the June 1932 ‘Bonus March’ in Washington DC; the passage of the 1934

Tydings-McDuffi e Act and the ten-year Commonwealth interregnum which

installed neocolonialism; CIO organizing (1934–1937) and the July 1934

General Strike in San Francisco; World War II, the Japanese occupation of

the Philippines, and the return of General Douglas McArthur. This period

also saw the beginning of the New Deal in 1933 with F. D. Roosevelt’s

administration, and the publication of key modernist works by Ezra Pound,

John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and William Carlos Williams, as well as

Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. From 1938 (when he was released from the

hospital) to 1941, Allos reached a point of disenchantment and rupture; he

confessed in his autobiographical testament that ‘it took me another fi ve years

before I was able to put my grand dream on paper in a literate form’ (1995:

216).

135REVISITING CARLOS BULOSAN

(3) BREAKTHROUGH: from 1946 to 1956, Allos’s return to labor-union

activism as editor of the ILWU 1952 Yearbook. He was invited to undertake

this editorial job in 1950 by his old friend Chris Mensalvas, who was president

of ILWU, Local 37, the Filipino cannery workers’ union, from 1949 to 1959.

FBI surveillance of Allos, dormant since his days with the leftist Hollywood

circle, heated up during the attempt to deport Mensalvas and Ernesto

Mangaoang, ILWU offi cials branded as ‘communists’. The year 1948 may be

a pivotal year for Allos, as intimated by two letters where the theme of

individual sacrifi ce for the good of the community is an obsessive leitmotif.

In one he wrote to his nephew, Arthur, the following lines, ‘Every man dreams

to make something of himself, but sometimes he gives up these dreams for

others. And that is the greatest decision of all for a man to make’. In the

other, to his nephew Fred, he urges Fred to apply his intellectual gifts ‘toward

the safeguarding of our great heritage, the grandeur of our history, the realiza-

tion of our great men’s dream for a free and good Philippines. That is real

genius; it is not selfi sh; it sacrifi ces itself for a free and good Philippines’

(Campomanes and Gernes, 1988: 33, 36).

While the Philippines was granted formal independence in 1946, it remained

economically, politically, and militarily dependent on Washington through the

infamous ‘parity’ amendment to the Philippine Constitution. The Huk (‘Huk’ is

the acronym for ‘People’s Army Against the Japanese’), organized in 1942 to fi ght the

Japanese occupiers, was declared illegal in 1948 and its leftist representatives were

ousted from the Philippine Congress in 1946. Gradually the Huk rebellion declined,

beginning in 1951 with the arrest of many nationalists, including the poet and trade

unionist Amado V. Hernandez (whose arrest Bulosan denounced in the 1951 ILWU

Yearbook). The key document for this period is Bulosan’s article, ‘Terrorism Rides

the Philippines’, deeply prophetic in this period when State terrorism (implemented

by President Macapagal-Arroyo backed by Washington/Pentagon) is infl icting havoc

and untold suffering. When Bulosan died, fascist repression eased the way for the

signing of the US-Mutual Defense Treaty; the replacement of the Bell Trade Act with

the Laurel-Langley Agreement reinforcing Philippine dependency; the US National

Security Council authorized expenditures to suppress the Huk insurgency. This

period of the Cold War includes the Taft-Hartley Act restricting trade union power,

the Korean War, McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade, the advent of mass television,

and major works by Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, J. D.

Salinger, and James Baldwin.

IV

The above parameters are pedagogical indicators or guides for further biographical

and sociocultural investigations. They are not meant to replace analytic inquiries of

specifi c texts or of sequences of expressive practices alongside, or coeval with, the

written word. Within this synchronic and diachronic fi eld of conditions, we can infer

the mediating factors of culture and nature that would allow us to elucidate the

complex interactions between the individual and his world. I propose that this

schematic periodizing of Allos’s itinerary as an exiled native endeavoring some kind

of ‘homecoming’ be considered as a heuristic point of departure for the project of

136 E SAN JUAN, JR

decentering the multiethnic archive and a metropole-centered, hegemonic criticism.

In the process, it might also serve to renew the submerged liberatory energies of

Bulosan’s works for the next generation of Filipino-Americans (not all of whom, I

trust, will be sucked into the abyss of cyberinformation and commodifi ed simulacra)

in what is now a planetary diaspora of ten million overseas kababayan. This will also

be a means of foregrounding the theme of exile and return that underlies, and to some

extent, makes coherent the fragmentary, unraveled strands of Allos’s life.

During this last decade of his life, Allos wrote The Cry as well as numerous essays,

poems, and still unpublished stories and articles. Notable is an unsigned protest

(already noted earlier) against McCarthyite repression in the Philippines, entitled

‘Terrorism Rides the Philippines’, in the 1951 ILWU [International Longshoreman’s

and Warehouseman’s Union] Yearbook. The signifi cance of this essay cannot be

over-emphasized. It shows Allos in the thick of the motion of events, the ‘not-yet’

moving to the ‘concrete universal’. Contrary to the rumor, Allos did not lapse into

despair, despite being blacklisted, ostracized from Establishment media, reviled and

calumniated by reactionary Filipino journalists. Apart from the ILWU, he affi liated

with the progressive group surrounding Josephine Patrick, his comrade in Seattle,

who was active in the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign-Born and in the

Communist Party USA, with its Popular Front program. At this time, together with

novelist Howard Fast and Black educator W. E. B. Du Bois, Allos supported an effort

to publish the autobiography of Luis Taruc, one of the leaders of the Huk rebellion

in the Philippines (De Leon, 1999). Taruc’s Born of the People (actually authored by

William J. Pomeroy) was published in 1953 by International Publishers in New York

(Pomeroy, 1992).

A catalyzing encounter of visions and sensibilities occurred at this point in history.

I suggest that it is Allos’s acquaintance with the poet-unionist Amado V. Hernandez’s

work and encounter with Taruc’s biography that afforded the condition of possi bility

for the construction of what can be called a ‘national allegory’ (to use Fredric

Jameson’s controversial notion), by no means offering a photographic documentary

or ‘realistic’ description of the Huk insurgency in the Philippines (Bulosan never

became a US citizen and never visited the Philippines). Now a cursory examination

of the essay, ‘Terrorism Rides the Philippines’, together with selected letters to friends

during this period, will easily demonstrate Allos’s suffi cient understanding of the

political, cultural, and economic situation in the Philippines. He followed events

closely, tracking the nuances and innuendoes in the news reports and communications

from friends. But he was more interested in how his situation was refracted and

elaborated by events happening in the Philippines, how he could make sense of his

life in relation to the situation of his compatriots, than in compiling raw facts and

inventorying incidents for their own sake.

The Cry invents an example of an exceptional genre called ‘minor literature’

by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1986). Like AIH, it is not the stereotypical

autobiography of the individual hero confronting the problems of a ‘godless’ cosmos,

nor a psychological novel in the manner of Dostoevsky or Faulkner, but a synthesis

of typical individuals and representative situations. The Cry does not claim by any

means to simply document experience because ‘it was there’. That notion is at best

a ‘mimetic fallacy’, at worst just a mistaken view of the concept of realism.

Realism — specifi cally, a critical one where verisimilitude functions to render the

137REVISITING CARLOS BULOSAN

determinately typical, not the statistical average (Lukacs, 1972) — is not a mechanical

reproduction of sensory data, or unmediated transcript of impressions; rather, it is a

sophisticated aesthetic convention with a code of rules and protocols. It is ludicrous

to oppose imagination to experience (Del Rosario, 1995: 4; see also Teodoro, 1985)

since the raw materials of experience are already mediated through the imagination,

through the transfi guring crucible of novelistic invention. A ‘minor’ literature seeks

to fulfi ll the responsibility to the Other, the Other here conceived as the realm of

possibilities, as the negative Alterity that interrogates the Modernity inaugurated by

Hobbesian individualism and Lockean liberalism — to use Enrique Dussel’s (2007)

articulation of the difference.

V

This is the moment to return to my thesis, whose import may now be obvious

but still needs specifi cation: Allos’s body of writing cannot be fully understood and

appreciated without respecting his ethico-artistic motivations (which may or may

not be realized in practice) and its ideological, philosophical grounding. This can

be found, among other texts, in ‘The Writer as Worker’ or in the letters where

axiomatic principles and thought-experiments may be found. In one letter dated 8

April 1955, Allos refl ects on his own work:

My politico-economic ideas are embodied in all my writings, but more concretely in

my poetry. Here let me remind you that The Laughter is not humor: it is satire; it is

indictment against an economic system that stifl ed the growth of the primitive, making

him decadent overnight without passing through the various stages of growth and decay.

The hidden bitterness in this book is so pronounced in another series of short stories [now

collected in The Philippines Is in the Heart], that the publishers refrained from publishing

it for the time being [. . .] (Bulosan, 1995: 184)

Allos is more teleological and refl exive in the 1955 autobiographical sketch for

Twentieth Century Authors. Notice that after recounting his life-history, the ‘voyage

in and out’, he returns to the traumatic moment of illness — his fi rst one in 1936–1938

precipitated the discovery of his artistic vocation, as I have described earlier — against

the background of a seemingly irretrievable past, a loss that cannot be healed by

elegiac reiteration and memorializing prayer, against which the compulsion to launch

forward erupts in this agonistic, prophetic confession of faith:

I am sick again. I know I will be here (Firland Sanitarium, Seattle, Washington) for a long

time. And the grass hut where I was born is gone, and the village of Mangusmana is gone,

and my father and his one hectare of land are gone, too. And the palm-leaf house in

Binalonan is gone, and two brothers and a sister are gone forever.

But what does it matter to me? The question is — what impelled me to write?

The answer is — my grand dream of equality among men and freedom for all. To give

a literate voice to the voiceless one hundred thousand Filipinos in the United States,

Hawaii, and Alaska. Above all and ultimately, to translate the desires and aspirations of

the whole Filipino people in the Philippines and abroad in terms relevant to contemporary

history.

Yes, I have taken unto myself this sole responsibility. (Bulosan, 1995: 216)

138 E SAN JUAN, JR

This vow reiterates the one made in AIH as he recalls the Tayug peasant uprising

near his hometown: to ‘give signifi cance to all that was starved and thwarted in my

life’ (Bulosan, 1946: 62), the kernel of the life-long project for which he became a

writer, not just any writer but an ‘organic intellectual’ of the Filipino masses (see San

Juan, 2000). Because of this over-riding commitment, Allos’s portrayal of all ‘the

wretched of the earth’ departed from the code of classic realism and adopted a more

tendentious cast, a Brechtian teaching/learning rationale aimed at ‘conscienticization’.

This defi nes more precisely the allegorical/didactic style and dialogic norm of his

texts, qualities that display affi nities with the ‘rhizomatic’ poetics of Kafka and other

decolonizing ‘third world’ writers. Indeed, Allos’s texts show characteristics of

‘minor’ (employed in a special sense) writing formulated by Deleuze and Guattari

— ‘deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political

immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation’ (Deleuze and Guattari,

1986: 18) — aspects of which I have touched on here and elsewhere.

There is, to be sure, nothing minor in Allos’s intervention in counter-hegemonic

revolutions. When Allos’s novel fi rst appeared in the Philippines as The Power of the

People just after the February 1986 ‘People Power’ revolt, I argued that the work

could be viewed as a kind of ‘national allegory’, in the sense that the Chinese Lu

Hsun’s or the Senegalese Ousmane Sembene’s works functioned as polysemic indices

and symbolic fables of their distinctive social formations. It addressed in an oblique

way the crisis of that specifi c conjuncture in US-Philippines history, the persecution

of Filipino militants Mensalvas and Mangaong fi guring as a synecdoche of the

repression of the Huks by the Magsaysay puppet regime in the Philippines (De Vera,

1994).

Uncannily, the Huk uprising brought back images of the Tayug insurrection — an

image compulsively repeated in national-democratic narrativizations of Philippine

history. This episode spanned the early years of the Cold War era, prior to the

explosion of the Civil Rights struggles in the 1960s and the resurgence of ‘third world’

liberation movements from Algeria and Cuba to Vietnam and Nicaragua. The threat

of deportation for Filipino activists (recall the earlier fates of Pedro Calosa and

Pablo Manlapit) foreclosed Allos’s dream of returning to the land of his birth. He

never applied for US citizenship (Guyotte, 1997), fearing perhaps that he would

be turned down since the FBI had already been on his trail since his days with the

Hollywood prime suspects (one wonders if he ever met Bertolt Brecht, Theodor

Adorno, or Thomas Mann, all exiles from Nazi Germany, in Los Angeles). In any

case, for Allos (c. 1955), the stakes were no longer the urge to belong to a utopian

‘America’ or return to a pastoral refuge in Pangasinan; it was now writing ‘for or

against war, for or against life’ (Bulosan, 1995: 184). In doing so, he reclaimed for

the Filipino diaspora the proletarian incarnation of a critical universality fi rst fully

announced in Marx and Engels’ 1848 Communist Manifesto.

Can we not consider The Cry as a sublimated sequel to AIH? Again, from a

dialectical viewpoint, there was negation and affi rmation across the terrain of thought

and lived experience. Clearly the search for community across race, gender and class

persisted, but sublated onto another level: now, the guerilla contingent becomes the

site of the unfolding of a concrete and critical universal, the unwinding of a unity

of opposites, the stratifi ed totality of a nation in the process of becoming. It was an

139REVISITING CARLOS BULOSAN

allegory of the people’s self-movement, a spontaneous but also necessary internal

self-transformation, with all the inconsistencies, excesses, and contradictions that

characterize such beginnings in history. It could not be just a repetition of the Manongs

driven by an alienated and alienating environment until the war against fascist capital

unites everyone. His letters to Dorothy Babb (the person most intimately attached to

Allos) from 1937 to 1942 closes that period of beleaguered self-examination and

familial anxieties. Allos’s tried-and-tested sensibility had to wrestle with the new

forms of barbarism, including the vagaries of self-indulgent petty-bourgeois desire,

and explore new forms of popular resistance and class-sectoral alliance.

A historic rupture occurred in Allos’s journey, as well as in the itinerary of the

Filipino community in the US, marked by the Huk insurrection from 1946 to 1952. It

was heightened by the anti-communist panic surrounding the Korean War and

the confrontation with Communist China. Allos’s possible meeting with Amado V.

Hernandez may have re-kindled memories of his impassioned solidarity with the

Spanish Republican forces, expressed in poems like ‘Biography Between Wars’,

‘Meeting with a Discoverer’ and others. One letter confessed his ‘secret dream of

writing here [in the US] a 1,500 page novel covering thirty-fi ve years of Philippine

history’, with the fourth one covering 1951–1961, which I consider will be a great

crisis in Philippine history’ (Bulosan, 1995: 180). This ‘crisis’ was fully dramatized in

the bloody sacrifi cial encounters of the insurgents in The Cry.

Allos would not traverse that ten-year crucial passage, uncannily prophesied in

November 1949, foiled by the combined weight of the past and the burden of the

present. Had he lived a few more years, his involvement with the ILWU would

have eventually connected him with Philip Vera Cruz, Larry Itliong, and the vanguard

of the California farmworkers’ strike, then training in the fi elds of Delano and

Coachella in the early 1960s. The Manongs rediscovered or, more precisely,

reinvented themselves in reaffi rming the right to strike. But FBI harassment and racial

exclusion helped shorten his life, so that he did not see the time of another renaissance

of popular-democratic faith, the Civil Rights and anti-war movement of the 1960s.

Refracting the leitmotif of homecoming that sutures the solitude of his stories, poems

and letters, The Cry enacts the return: one traumatized character (Dante), already

home from the US, awaits the coming of another one, the ‘wounded’ messenger

(Felix Rivas) who never appears, suspending the denouement, converting this

expectation of the advent of the legendary bearer of ‘Good News’ into a permanent

condition. Is this Allos’s metaphor for hope, the ‘Not-Yet’ pregnant in the womb of

the present, realizing his responsibility for Others?

Cultural practices and artistic representations, of course, are products of history

and the interpellations of group consciousness. And though not directly caused by

practical necessities, they register both the pressure of the moment and the exigencies

of the embattled artist. Suffi ce it here to assert, again, that the central theme of exile

and tortuous return in all of Bulosan’s works can be rearticulated as the project of

liberating the homeland from feudal and colonial oppression, a collective project

of national, democratic self-determination. This desire to complete the ‘unfi nished

revolution’ of 1898 amid the self-alienation and deracination of the colonized subject

transplanted to the ‘belly of the beast’ is one which, in varying historical arenas,

resonates in the life and deeds of such revolutionary militants and thinkers as Jose

Marti, Aime Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and others. I cite

140 E SAN JUAN, JR

two reviewers who elaborate on this theme in their own way. This is a topic that, to

my knowledge, only one scholar, Tim Libretti (1995), has so far explored in depth.

From a sympathetic perspective, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes:

Poverty, shame, and shattered dreams prevented the [Filipino] migrants from going back

to the Philippines. Many died in the United States, old, alone, and broken in body.

Bulosan shared that fate, but in The Cry he revisits his native land the only way he

can. The anguish of the novel is not only the anguish of its characters, but of its author

as well; the book represents the act of an imagination in exile attempting to carve out

a space away from the confusions of America, and attempting to return home with a

starkness of clarity that life in America did not allow. Bulosan saw himself in those

revolutionary seven, hampered by deep physical and emotional pain, but striving for a

distant yet defi nite goal. (1996: 6)

While Nguyen wonders how the novel ‘feels contemporary in that the situation

today is not any different than in 1950’ so that the work of writing for the sake

of justice and social change proves even more imperative, Tomio Geron reaffi rms

the need to move away from Popular Front categories to confront the historical neces-

sities, both personal and collective, that transformed the naïve and trusting peasant

boy from the village of Mangusamana, Philippines, to the prophetic visionary forging

the ‘conscience of his race’:

[. . .] Bulosan writes from the perspective of ‘exile’ rather than the traditional Asian

American ‘immigrant.’ He saw American imperialism in the Philippines as the cause of

his family’s dismemberment and dislocation, and connected it directly to the exploitation

he suffered at the hands of capitalists in the United States. These appraisals argue against

cultural-pluralist and assimilationist notions of ‘multiculturalism,’ examining power

relations in the Filipino experience in America and the Philippines. (1995: 13)

These varying testimonies argue that it is possible to offset the hegemonic doxa

that endorses the immigrant story of hard work and success implicit, if somewhat

parodied and undercut, in AIH. But it will need a massive consensus to offset that

view, one premised on the argument that Allos’s role as exiled writer-activist cannot

be fi xed, reifi ed, to the early period of his struggle in the US: the 1930s and the

Popular Front agenda. When AIH ends with the united-front campaign against

German and Japanese imperialism, we do not pack up our bags and go back to the

disenfranchised communities to enjoy the rewards of pax Americana. Allos himself

did not settle back to bask in the glories of American Exceptionalism; his utopianism,

however much romanticized or displaced by a yearning for ‘roots’ in the past growing

into the future, proved resilient enough to compel him to re-engage with his

new-found ‘brothers’ in the ILWU as well as in the homeland, where the survivors

of Luis Taruc’s guerillas would soon evolve into the embryonic avatars of the

Communist Party of the Philippines’ New People’s Army.

VI

We owe it to Lane Hirabayashi and Marilyn Alquizola that fi nally, after fi ve years of

waiting, the FBI records of surveillance of Allos has been released to the public by

141REVISITING CARLOS BULOSAN

virtue of the Freedom of Information Act. This, I hope, will spur the de-centering of

the Bulosan canon in order to liberate its emancipatory energies in a world-systemic

critique. We need to undertake the task of which Pascale Casanova recently remind-

ed us, the task of re-establishing ‘the lost bond between literature, history and the

world, while still maintaining a full sense of the irreducible singularity of literary

texts’ (2005: 71). It is analogous to recognizing the dialectical reciprocity of Allos, the

singular individual, and Bulosan as representative of the Filipino collectivity, the

emergent provocative voice not only of the Filipino masses of workers and peasants,

but also of all the dispossessed and disinherited of the earth. This is the concrete

universal we need to theorize and achieve, even in the face of the temptation of

model-minority success and postcolonial mimicry.

At about the time Allos wrote ‘Terrorism Rides the Philippines’, two labor-union

militants were born as prophetic signifi ers of the future: Gene Viernes in 1951 and

Silme Domingo in 1952. Both young men matured in Seattle during the social ferment

of the 1960s and the anti-Marcos mobilization from 1972 to 1986. They also became

involved early in their life with the ILWU, Local 37, Bulosan’s and Mensalvas’ union.

In 1981, both were murdered by pro-Marcos thugs supported by reactionary elements

of the Filipino American community in Seattle, Washington. Domingo was a key

militant of the leftist Union of Democratic Filipinos, leading the resistance against the

US-Marcos dictatorship; the trial of the murderers revealed the complicity of local

Filipino leaders in the brutal gangster tactics of the Marcos regime to suppress dissent

in the United States. This is unequivocal proof of Allos’s belief that one cannot

divorce the struggle back home against feudal-comprador barbarism supported

politically and militarily by the imperialist bloc (see Schirmer and Shalom, 1987:

143–152) from the fi ght for social justice and equality in the metropole of fi nance

capital. Both fronts in the popular-democratic struggle are linked dialectically,

as dramatized by the character of Dante in The Cry — a shadowy double or

hypothetical surrogate for Allos, whose ‘wounds’ infl icted by his ordeal in the US

must needs be cauterized and cured by facing the same enemies he fl ed from in the

guise of the local landlords, bureaucrats, and predatory warlords who safeguarded

their masters’ interests. This is also what Philip Vera Cruz found when, despite his

public protest, he witnessed Cesar Chavez endorsing the vicious Marcos dictatorship

in the 1970s. Vera Cruz had no alternative but to resign from the very union that he,

Larry Itliong and other Filipinos helped organize with the historic Delano Grape

Strike in 1965, nine years after Bulosan’s death.

In April 2006 the Library of Congress held a symposium honoring Carlos Bulosan

and his still unassayed contribution to US multicultural democracy in the light of

the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Filipino arrival in US territory. This is an

unprecedented and salutary event. The Philippines is currently experiencing a political

crisis reminiscent of the imposition of brutal military rule by Ferdinand Marcos

in 1972. Were he alive, Bulosan would be the fi rst to rally Filipinos against the

unprecedented extra-judicial political killings and abductions by the fascist-terrorist

Arroyo regime of lawyers, journalists, parliamentarians, and other citizens in their

country of origin. Amid the ‘war against terrorism’, with the Philippines declared as

the ‘second battlefront’ after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the

Pentagon, it is an opportune time to reappraise Bulosan’s works, its resonance and

142 E SAN JUAN, JR

incalculable infl uence on the contingents of young Filipino migrants (called OFWs,

Overseas Filipino Workers) in the US, Europe, and elsewhere.

There are signs that, despite the apathy I noted earlier, Bulosan’s writings are

fi nally being rediscovered and renewed at the same time, by a new generation of

readers here, in the Philippines, and in the unprecedented Filipino diaspora around

the planet. One example of renewal is the prodigiously resourceful staging of the

short story, ‘The Romance of Magno Rubio’, directed by Loy Arenas. There is

no doubt the benefi ciaries (mentioned by Mensalvas in his obituary in which he

inventoried Allos’s Estate as ‘one old typewriter, wornout socks, old suit’ and

‘Benefi ciaries’ as ‘His people’ will now exceed the number of those heroic Manongs

whom Bulosan — as Dolores Feria, his devoted friend reported a year after he died

— cherished in his shy and gentle way; the kababayan (compatriot) whom he

initially addressed and paid homage to a century ago (Cimatu, 2002; Feria, 1956).

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Notes on Contributor

E. San Juan, Jr, directs the Philippines Cultural Studies Center at Storrs, CT, USA;

he is Emeritus Professor of Ethnic Studies, English and Comparative Literature in

several US universities. He was recently a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation Study

Center at Bellagio, Italy, and Fulbright Professor of American Studies at Leuven

University, Belgium. His most recent books are Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke

UP), Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell UP), In the Wake of Terror:

Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern World (Lexington), US Imperialism

and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave Macmillan), and Balik-bayang Sinta: An

E. San Juan Reader (Ateneo de Manila University Press). In Spring 2008 he will be

Visiting Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of the Philippines and several

other colleges in the Philippines.