"America Is in the Heart” is Carlos S. Bulosan’s autobiography, detailing his escape from poverty in his birthplace in Binalonan, Pangasinan, north of Manila, to the land of milk and honey in search of a better life. He arrived in the US in 1930, at a time when the country was suffering from the Great Depression.
“The present edition of “America Is in the Heart” ought to firm up Carlos Bulosan’s place in the mainstream of Philippine literature. It celebrates the heroic spirit of one migrant worker who traveled far to find a dream country and how his failed quest yielded a book powered by a vision of a dream society that workingmen would have to forge themselves through painstaking struggle,” says noted Filipino academician Bienvenido L. Lumbera.
Susan Potter- Evangelista describes Bulosan as “...the most famous Filipino-American writer of all time” in her doctoral dissertation, Carlos Bulosan and His Poetry: A Biography and Anthology.
In his introduction to “America Is in the Heart,” Carey McWilliams quotes Epifanio San Juan (Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle, 1972, p. 125): “Of the Filipino writers in English who began their careers before World War II, Bulosan remains the most viable, startling and contemporary.”
As he wished, Bulosan became “a writer in America” with his short stories and poetry being published in such magazines as The New Yorker. He was able to do this by educating himself, reading extensively in public libraries since he had only three years of formal education in his hometown of Binalonan. However, he was never truly at home in his adopted country. In fact, he never became an American citizen. Shortly before he died, Bulosan mentioned to P.C. Morantte, his biographer, the possibility of his taking a trip back to his native country. He never got to make that trip. He died a poor man in 1956 in the US when he was only 42.
“It was this book (America Is in the Heart), his ‘personal history’, that came home to us, and this at a time when so many of his countrymen are still dreaming as overseas workers of their own Americas. If America can at least wake them up before they take off, Bulosan’s masterwork will have served to steel them against frustration and despair, for this ‘history’ is a map, scarifying yet ennobling somehow, through the desolate country of one migrant worker’s heart,” Lumbera says.
The book divides itself into four parts. The first part establishes the rural background which projects Allos as the archetypal peasant boy in quest of a “life of ease and comfort” in the land of milk and honey. Bulosan grew up on a family farm in Binalonan where the struggle against nature and the feudal system had earlier driven two elder brothers to escape to the US. The family is depicted as tightly-knit with both parents working hard: the father tilling the land and the mother earning extra income as an itinerant vendor so that the children could obtain an education that would free them from the labor that bound them to the land.
The second part details Bulosan’s encounter with fascist violence by the police, racist violence by white farm workers jealous over employment under Depression conditions, and the corrosion of values into which he was born in his home country.
The youngest male in the family, Allos on his arrival in the West Coast in 1930, finds that he has blundered into a nightmare in his quest for the “American dream” schooling in Pangasinan had given him. He looks for the elder brothers who had earlier left the Philippines and when he finds them, both have turned into strangers-the eldest brother Aurelio, a schoolteacher back in the Philippines, had declined into the ranks of alien lumpens; the other brother, Dionisio, had turned to a life of crime.
Bulosan’s passion for reading allowed him to survive in the hostile world of Filipino migrant workers, capitalist bosses and the urban poor milieu of the 1930s. It was this passion that was eventually to endow him with an identity denied to most of his countrymen living in the US. The prestigious Harcourt, Brace and Co. published “The Laughter of My Father,” his book of stories about a Philippine village. It was greeted by audience acclaim and established Bulosan in the company of current literary celebrities in mid-1940’s America.
The rest of the autobiography traces Bulosan’s involvement in labor movements, which at the time was a commitment fraught with danger from goons, police and hostile elements of society.
In the history of Philippine literature before the proclamation of martial law in the country, Bulosan occupied only a marginal corner. The reigning critical orthodoxy and his political views relegated him to that corner of a society where the dominant literary arbiters were creative writers and academicians who had been the beneficiaries of grant-giving bodies such as the Fulbright Program, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Asia Foundation.
But gradually, Bulosan started to be noticed in the Philippines. On the eve of the declaration law in 1972, the US-based academician and Marxist critic Epifanio San Juan Jr. called attention to the relevance of Bulosan’s works to the struggle in the Philippines for freedom and democracy. In 1973, the University of Washington Press came out with a reprint edition of “America Is in the Heart.” In 1977, an unpublished short novel with the original title of “Cry and Dedication” was published as “The Power of the People” by Tabloid Books in Ontario, Canada. The following year, the first Bulosan book — The Philippines Is In The Heart — to appear in the Philippines was put out by New Day Publishers. Amerasia Journal, a publication of the University of California, Los Angeles, also put together selected writings of Bulosan in a special issue in 1979. A Philippine edition of “America Is in the Heart” was published in 1980 by the National Bookstore. The Hawaii branch of Friends of the Filipino People in 1982 issued Bulosan’s Selected Works and Letters. In 1983, San Juan and the National Bookstore published Bulosan: An introduction with selections. As a testimony to the growing popularity of Bulosan, Binalonan unveiled on Dec. 11, 1983 a monument and named a street for him. “This recognition of Binalonan’s native son seems to be part of a national trend of growing interest in him, in his biography and in his writings,” says Evangelista. By 2002, “America Is in the Heart” was in its 15th printing.
