America is in the Heart (1946) by Carlos Bulosan

 Book Review

America is in the Heart (1946)

by Carlos Bulosan

  I was turned onto America is in the Heart by A Man of Two Faces by Viet Tranh Nguyen.  In A Man of Two Faces, Nguyen draws on his experience as an English professor to generate an alternate list of "Great American Novels" that don't normally get listed.  America is in the Heart is written by Filipino-American author Carlos Bulosan.  Just looking at the publication date, it isn't hard to see why it had trouble garnering attention. America certainly wasn't looking to re-evaluate its (very) recent racist past the year after World War II ended.  

  It was republished in the 1970's by the University of Washington press- the library copy I checked out was from the sixth edition, published in 1984.  Amazon put out a Kindle classics edition in 2022 but it is way out of print in physical form, with used copies going for sixty bucks on Amazon.    America is in the Heart is part novel, part memoir and part history lesson, about the experience of Filipino immigrants in the period before the beginning of World War II.  Filipino's had an unusual legal status in the United States:  They were allowed to come but were not citizens. As depicted by Bulosan they were the frequent victim of racist violence, not only at the hands of whites but also via Japanese and Chinese Americans who often stood one level higher in the socio-economic pyramid of inter-war California. 

   Bulosan depicts a peripatetic life of farm labor and rootlessness, spurred by the frequent outbreaks of violence and job and housing discrimination.  Bulosan got heavily involved with the farm labor movement and much of the action of the book involves him going from part of the west coast to another, interacting with different activists and workers, and then getting chased out.   One aspect of Busolan's experience that may surprise modern residents of the US is the utter absence of Filipino women in this book.  Today, the concept of the Filipino nurse/medical worker is entrenched to the point of stereotype but before World War II it seems like the only Filipino's in the US were men.

   Unlike many other books of this type (Great American Novel/Immigration story), America in the Heart does start with Bulosan being brought to the US by his parents as a child.  Rather, he emigrates as an adult, and the entire first portion of the book recounts his life in the Philippines.   Even if the reader is familiar with the anti-farmworker violence that plagued California in the 20th century, the violence in America is in the Heart may seem shocking.  It shocked me, as did the open, virulent racism directed specifically to Filipinos.