PENGUIN CLASSICS
AMERICA IS IN THE HEART
CARLOS BULOSAN (1911–1956), born in Binalonan, Pangasinan, under U.S. colonial occupation of the Philippines, arrived in the United States at the start of the Great Depression as part of a generation of Filipino migrant workers. From 1930 to 1956, Bulosan developed into a leading Filipino writer in the United States committed to social justice. In the 1930s, Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine introduced Bulosan to the literary world as a poet. His editing of The New Tide (1934), a Filipino workers’ literary magazine, connected Bulosan to progressive American writers such as Richard Wright and Sanora Babb. Bulosan established his position as a major Filipino writer with The Laughter of My Father (1944) and America Is in the Heart (1946). An iconic figure of Filipino American literature, Bulosan was recovered by the Asian American movement and the Philippine national sovereignty movement of the 1970s. With his body weakened by a long battle with tuberculosis, Bulosan died in Seattle’s King County Hospital on September 11, 1956, due to advanced pneumonia. A pioneering Filipino writer-activist in the United States, Bulosan is an iconic figure of Filipino American literature and Filipino American labor history.
ELAINE CASTILLO was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. America Is Not the Heart is her first novel, and was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
An internationally renowned literary and cultural critic, E. SAN JUAN, JR. is emeritus professor of English, comparative literature, and ethnic studies, University of Connecticut and Washington State University. He received his degrees from the University of the Philippines and Harvard University. He was previously a fellow of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, and Fulbright Professor of American Studies, University of Leuven, Belgium. His recent books are Carlos Bulosan: Revolutionary Filipino Writer in the United States; Working through the Contradictions; In the Wake of Terror; and U.S. Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines. He will be a professorial lecturer at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines and at the University of Santo Tomas in 2019.
JEFFREY ARELLANO CABUSAO is an associate professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island. He was a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at Kalamazoo College. He received a 2011 Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Award from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). His teaching and research focus on U.S. Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, and Women’s Studies. In 2016 he edited Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt: Critical Perspectives on Carlos Bulosan.
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First published in the United States of America by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1946
This edition with a foreword by Elaine Castillo and an introduction by E. San Juan, Jr., published in Penguin Books 2019
Foreword copyright © 2019 by Elaine Castillo
Introduction copyright © 2019 by E. San Juan, Jr.
Notes in “Appendix: Selected Letters of Carlos Bulosan” copyright © 2019 by Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao
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Carlos Bulosan’s letters from Sound of Falling Light: Letters in Exile by Carlos Bulosan, edited by Dolores S. Feria, The University of the Philippines Press. Originally appeared in The Diliman Review, Volume 8, Numbers 1–3 (January–September 1960), published by the College of Liberal Arts of the University of the Philippines.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Bulosan, Carlos, author. | Castillo, Elaine, writer of foreword. | San Juan, E. (Epifanio), 1938- writer of introduction. | Cabusao, Jeffrey Arellano, writer of supplementary textual content.
Title: America is in the heart / Carlos Bulosan ; foreword by Elaine Castillo; introduction by E. San Juan, Jr. ; selected letters of Carlos Bulosan and suggestions for further exploration by Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao.
Description: [New York, New York] : Penguin Books, 2019. | “First published in the United States of America by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. 1943.” | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018051637 (print) | LCCN 2018060172 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143134039 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525505815 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Bulosan, Carlos. | Filipino Americans--Biography. | Filipino American migrant agricultural laborers--Biography. | Philippines--Social life and customs.
Classification: LCC PR9550.9.B8 (ebook) | LCC PR9550.9.B8 A8 2019 (print) | DDC 818/.5209 [B]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051637
Version_1
TO GRACE FUNK AND JOHN WOODBURN
Because I would like to thank you for accepting me into your world, I dedicate this book of my life in the years past: let it be the testament of one who longed to become a part of America.
Contents
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by ELAINE CASTILLO
Introduction by E. SAN JUAN, JR.
Notes
Works Cited
AMERICA IS IN THE HEART
Appendix: Selected Letters of Carlos Bulosan
Suggestions for Further Exploration by JEFFREY ARELLANO CABUSAO
Foreword
My father, Ernesto Mabalon, choked back tears as we watched the doors of our family’s old restaurant collapse under the bulldozer on a hot spring morning. “That restaurant, that building, that place, was the beginning of all of us,” he said, his voice breaking. “That was where we all came from.” And then he turned away, so I could not see his tears.
Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Little Manila Is in the Heart
I can’t remember how old I was exactly when I first read Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart: only that I was old enough to think I was mature, which means I couldn’t have been more than fourteen. I know I didn’t encounter the book in a classroom, as some of my luckier friends did; I never met any Filipinx families in the books I read for school. I know I was already a voracious reader, and I’m almost certain I borrowed the book from heaven on earth, otherwise known to me at the time as the Milpitas Library. I know it wasn’t the first book I’d read about Filipinx Americans or Asian Americans, and yet it was the first book in which I saw people who were like the people I came home to.
Do you remember how old you were when you first read a book that had a character who looked and lived like you in it? Maybe the first book you read was like that, and every book after it since, and you’ve never had to wonder about finding someone like yourself or the people who made you in books—you’ve always been right there at the center, unquestioned. Maybe someone who loved you (a parent, a teacher, a librarian) gave you the book, with all the ceremony of an heirloom being passed down: extending a hand to save you because they, too, had once been saved in that way. Maybe you came to that book entirely alone and late in life, and wished you had come to it younger, without so many of your scars; maybe you still sometimes wonder about the kind of person you might have become if you’d found its pages back then. Maybe you never found the book at all, and resigned yourself
to the shape of that absence; maybe you stopped looking altogether. Maybe you told yourself you stopped looking; maybe you lied.
Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart is not simply one of the most seminal texts of Filipinx American literature, a rangy and generous root from which spring many of our most beloved and urgent Filipinx writers, not to mention immigrant writers and writers of color across the country. It’s also an American horror story of the highest order; the highest order being, of course, the historical. To not read it is, to put it simply, to not know America—to deprive oneself of the full backstory of the long, drawn-out, bloodied multiverse that is our shared history: Filipinx, American, everywhere in between. What you find in its pages is as regretfully alive today as it was in 1946, when the book was first published: its stark depictions of the miseries of early immigrant life, particularly Filipinx and Mexican migrant labor on the West Coast in the 1930s; its laceratingly familiar portrayals of white supremacy in action, including targeted police brutality, racist mobs attacking Filipinx and Mexican immigrant workers, trumped-up anxiety around the sexualized criminal menace supposedly posed by Black and Brown men, and historical amnesia around America’s colonial atrocities; its determined take on capitalist exploitation and class inequality, both in the Philippines and America. For me, it was the first book I’d ever read whose main characters came from the rural poor of the Philippines—in particular, the rural poor from the province of Pangasinan, populated by people like my mother and her family. Bulosan’s descriptions of the region and its profound social disparities in the early part of the book ring true to the lives my mother, aunts, and grandmother lived; to read a book about Filipinx characters who were not wealthy, educated, Manila-based, or remotely cosmopolitan—characters who would never own a Maria Clara, let alone be called one—felt like a rare gift.
The dubious accompaniment of that gift, however, is another aspect of the book that is just as regretfully alive today as it was in 1946: the undeniable culture of misogyny in the book, which features scene after scene of women, usually poor and vulnerable, being brutalized, beaten, raped, disappeared. The violence against women in America Is in the Heart is as frank and banal as it is apocalyptic, and it runs through the entire narrative like a vital vein. Bulosan’s autobiographical protagonist is often sympathetic to the plight of these women, in the Nice Guy brand of sympathy, but he does not substantially connect these women’s struggle with his own. There is no #MeToo for the women in Bulosan’s pages. That disturbing and revelatory silence cannot be overlooked when we talk about the book’s place in the canon, and what it means.
Teachers and writers often say that reading books gives us life tools, which is true—but those tools mean nothing without readers stepping up to the task of what those tools actually ask of us. Critical reading is a civic act; it’s the kind of reading that asks you to be both sharp and vulnerable to both the world of the book and the world the book emerges from; the kind of reading that asks you to bear witness to the things in a book that speak low and deep to some low and deep part of you, which might not always say easy or comforting things. Critical reading returns you to your life with renewed eyes; it deepens the world for you, inasmuch as it deepens you for the world. And it’s the things we do with the tools that reading gives to us that have not just world-building, but what we might call world-remaking force. When we read a book like America Is in the Heart, we have the chance to be not just readers of American horror (history), but its witnesses and inheritors. Bulosan’s novel is indispensable—so is confronting what lies in it.
One of those acts of witnessing—of inheritance—is to make sure that America Is in the Heart is not the only book we read about Filipinx communities, and that if it is the first, it will not be the last: that we read more books about the Filipinx diaspora that aren’t only written by and about hetero men; that we seek out and lift up books by and about the kind of women who appear in America Is in the Heart—books in which those women aren’t relegated to the bruised edge of the page. That we read and teach books about queer Filipinx characters, who don’t often find themselves centered in nation-defining epics. That we push back against the idea of nation-defining epics in the first place. As a Filipinx writer, I know well that I’m one of Bulosan’s many children; it’s a fact I cherish with my whole heart. I also know that to be part of a family also often means having to fight—and that fighting with your family is sometimes a way of fighting for them.
When I wrote my first novel, the epigraph I chose came from America Is in the Heart: “I knew I could trust a gambler because I had been one.” It’s a small line. And yet it’s one of my most beloved sentences, not just in Bulosan’s book, but in any book. The narrator is talking about pawning a stolen ring to a gambler, to get the money to pay for a doctor to see his brother, along with groceries for his brother to last three months, rent, etc. It’s of course not just a line about gambling; it’s also, crucially, a line about community. In particular, it’s a line about people making community between their own vulnerabilities and the vulnerabilities of others, between their own flaws and mendacities and the flaws and mendacities of others. It’s a line that reminds us that real communities aren’t formed with only the best and brightest parts of who we are. Community is granular, piecemeal, and daily, fastened together one stolen ring at a time. And like much of the book, the line gives not comfort, but solace—solace in the old roots of the word, where it once also meant to reconcile. This is also what critical reading of our histories makes possible: we cannot repair what we cannot reconcile; we cannot truly know what we will not truly see. America Is in the Heart asks nothing less of us than to try to see America, because it knows that only that which really sees us will really free us.
Representation is one of those words that’s as inadequate as tolerance, when we’re talking about the force that art can have in our lives. We know that no one wants to be simply represented, in the same way that no one wants to be simply tolerated. Representation doesn’t come remotely close to describing the viscerally intimate shock of what it feels like when you encounter a book that seems to see you: the language you speak, the people you know, the town you call home. It just makes you feel: real. For people who are used to feeling real, used to always seeing and affirming their own reality—not just depicted, but centered—anywhere from the page to the screen to the echoing halls of government, the force of that feeling might easily be underestimated. But it is a force indeed. Its other name might be called justice, or love. Bulosan knew that force well; his pages radiate with it. It’s what I suspect is really in the book’s heart.
ELAINE CASTILLO
Introduction
When America Is in the Heart (AIH) appeared in 1946, the Philippines was about to receive formal independence from the United States after four harrowing years of Japanese barbarism. Filipinos thanked the troops of General Douglas MacArthur for their “liberation.” Bulosan’s book was praised less for its progressive sentiments than for its affirmation of the sacrifices made in Bataan and Corregidor, memorialized for their promise of complete national liberation. Bulosan tried to capture the pathos of a long-awaited moment of reunion with missing brothers and lost compatriots. Victory over Japan seemed to wipe out the trauma of the United States’ bloody pacification of the islands from 1899 to 1913, an experience alluded to in Bulosan’s farewell to his brother Leon, a veteran of the European carnage that occurred thousands of miles away from Binalonan, Pangasinan, where Bulosan was born on November 2, 1911.
After his birth, the final phase of the Filipino-American War ended when General Pershing’s troops slaughtered ten thousand Moros in the Bud Bagsak massacre on June 11, 1913.1 Add this toll to about a million natives killed earlier, and we arrive at the initial fruit of President McKinley’s “Benevolent Assimilation” policy justifying the new empire’s possession. Soon the newly established school system and William Howard Taft’s “Filipinization” program produced a venal bureaucratic cas
te with close ties to the landlords and compradors that colluded with the new rulers through the Commonwealth period (from 1935 to 1946). When this oligarchy accepted the onerous conditions of independence in July 1946, Stanley Karnow wryly remarked, “they submitted voluntarily to their own exploitation,” eager to become “a favored and exemplary party within a Pax Americana” (330).2
Bulosan’s advent into the world was thus haunted with such paradoxes and perverse quandaries. His initiation was self-contradictory, his psyche charged with aberrant impulses and dispositions. Negativity saturated the milieu. Jaime Veneracion remarks that “while the Americans supposedly introduced land reform, the effect was the intensification of the tenancy problem” (63). Fierce antagonisms convulsed the impoverished countryside. One charismatic folk hero, Felipe Salvador, was hanged for leading a massive insurrection against landlords and their U.S. patrons. Between his birth and his departure for the United States in 1930, Bulosan might have reflected on the desperate revolts of peasants throughout the archipelago. In part 1 of America Is in the Heart he describes the 1931 Tayug uprising near his birthplace, which he didn’t personally witness. It was led by Pedro Calosa, a veteran of union activism in Hawaii who was jailed for instigating multiethnic strikes and summarily deported back to the colony in 1927.3
INTRACTABLE VOYAGERS
How did Filipinos suddenly show up in Hawaii? After three decades of imperial tutelage, the Philippines was transformed into a classic dependency providing raw materials and cheap labor. Pull-and-push factors were involved. From 1907 to 1926, more than one hundred thousand Filipinos were recruited by the Hawaiian plantations when Japanese immigration was prohibited. Driven by poverty and feudal coercions, the natives plotted their journey to pursue the “American dream of success” broadcast so seductively in the textbooks and mass media that mesmerized Bulosan and his generation. Neither sojourners nor aliens, they border-crossed as “wards” or “nationals.” Neither immigrants nor foreigners, they were denied citizenship, wandering from rural countryside to city ghettos and back. As Carey McWilliams observed, “they were neither fish nor fowl” (x).4 They explored an enigmatic terra incognita filled with extravagant fantasies and tragicomic comeuppances. These expatriates shared W. E. B. DuBois’s predicament of “double consciousness” (11), a condition of intermittent crisis sprung from years of slavery, serfdom, and capitalist bondage. It was a hazardous passage that may explain the ironic turnabouts and precarious balancing acts of Bulosan’s characters, a plight analogous to the misfortunes of the European peasantry when the enclosures of the commons engendered banditry, anarchic mayhem, and rogues—a profane saturnalia staged by a fabled ensemble of tricksters, derelict jokesters, and rambunctious fugitives.
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