Carlos Bulosan - America Is in the Heart

PENGUIN CLASSICS

AMERICA IS IN THE HEART

CARLOS BULOSAN (19111956), 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 Seattles 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 Womens 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 Bulosans 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 13 (JanuarySeptember 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

Cover illustration: Sarah Gonzales

TO GRACE FUNK AND JOHN WOODBURN

Contents

Foreword

I cant remember how old I was exactly when I first read Carlos Bulosans America Is in the Heart : only that I was old enough to think I was mature, which means I couldnt have been more than fourteen. I know I didnt 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 Im almost certain I borrowed the book from heaven on earth, otherwise known to me at the time as the Milpitas Library. I know it wasnt the first book Id 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 youve never had to wonder about finding someone like yourself or the people who made you in booksyouve 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 youd 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.

Bulosans 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. Its 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 Americato 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 Americas colonial atrocities; its determined take on capitalist exploitation and class inequality, both in the Philippines and America. For me, it was the first book Id ever read whose main characters came from the rural poor of the Philippinesin particular, the rural poor from the province of Pangasinan, populated by people like my mother and her family. Bulosans 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 cosmopolitancharacters who would never own a Maria Clara, let alone be called onefelt like a rare gift.