(x)… is in the Heart, pt.2
Class and Struggle in Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart
It took me a moment to realize why Carlos Bulosan’s classic novel, America is in the Heart, was not regularly taught in high schools or colleges. At around 3/4s into the book, well into the meat of the text, Bulosan launches into a soliloquy that argues for revolutionary unionism and the establishment of a true America that respects all peoples regardless of race, class, and background. This was the moment that it clicked for me. Of course they wouldn’t regularly teach this text in a country frozen in Cold War politics. It is shunned in the same way that Manuel Arguilla’s short stories are for the simple fact that it feels socialistic.
Of course, these writers are self-proclaimed Socialists, but they do much to depict and expose the rotten underbelly of the predominantly agrarian communities in the nation. Of course, the spiel is that things have gotten better, that these stories are relics of the past. But if these are mere relics, why do they still receive ire and disdain to the point that these classics are obscured from the Filipino literary canon?
I digress. But it is something worth looking into.
Carlos Bulosan did not shy away from portraying class dynamics in his novel. Regardless of where he situated the protagonist, the antagonisms between class and race did not exist in a vacuum. There is a scene early in the novel where a mestiza laughs at his mother for desperately picking up spilled beans on the market floor, another where an old woman begs for a handful of bagoong, another when peasants barter goods due to their abject lack of money. Bulosan is aware, and makes his readers aware, of the class dynamics in the Philippines alone. He remarks about agrarian unrest and protests against absentee landlords. He feels revolt against the selling of their land just so his brother can be competitive in a capitalist market through education. He watches his father wither away from a farmer proud to have his own land to till to a farmhand who walks from bayan to bayan in hopes of finding work in another landlord’s farm. He watches his mother waste away selling what little she could to make ends meet. Bulosan starkly portrays the realities of class in a country that is unaware of class. He shows how, writing in the 40s, the peasantry is fed the idea that the way out of poverty is mere hard work. He also shows how the system is rigged against these hard workers — how little has changed since then?
Bulosan wrote down an odyssey that many of his readers will not experience, but one that many still do in this day and age. He recounts tales of his rummaging through garbage in Baguio, of feeling nothing but hunger for days to come, of feeling desperate and hating the poverty he grew in but finding that the poverty was all he owned. He led a life believing that the way out of poverty was, first, education, then, eventually, hard work. What he found was that education came at a hefty price and hard work was rewarded by debt.
The first part of the novel deals chiefly with rural life as well as his childhood in Pangasinan. It is also a chilling description of tenant farming and the loss of land to distant and abstract landlords. Bulosan watched as they lost the land their family owned for generations as well as the house built on it due to the parasitic and manipulative stipulations of the landlords in regards to the selling and leasing of land. He also implicates the Roman Catholic Church in that they were complicit in the suffering of the peasantry. Bulosan even goes as far as narrativizing a peasant revolt successful in taking the town, but failed after better-armed state forces slaughtered them at the town plaza. As such, even as he was writing from America, Bulosan knew that he would be read in the Philippines as well. Given this knowledge, he framed the first part of the novel — the part that takes place in the Philippines — as describing the hardship of rural life as well as the consequences of the pressures of modern, capitalist living on a feudal agrarian society. The mere fact that Bulosan mentions Arguilla by name shows that he was aware of the growing Socialist sentiments in the country at the time he was writing the novel.
The tone changes once the story moves to America. Bulosan first describes the isolation that immigrants feel even amongst themselves. It is this isolation that separates and inhibits people from forming true and intimate connections between other people. It is also from this that Bulosan argues the crimes, debauchery, and desperation of Filipinos come from. Believing that America was the land of promise, Bulosan describes a dejected Filipino community scattered along the American West Coast after realizing that — by virtue of their skin and foreignness — there were no opportunities for them in the land of opportunities. In the face of this alienation from what they deemed to be their reward from facing down a strange land, the Filipinos took to the basest of their instincts and gave in to violence, indulgence, and substance abuse. For a good portion in the novel, this is what the reader slugs through, scenes of crime, prostitution, murder, and descriptions of people that seem to be taken straight from Emile Durkheim’s Suicide.
Past this, in the undercurrent of the novel, Bulosan gains class consciousness after being subject to crime, discrimination, and brutalization in the face of white employers and laborers. It was not enough that he was poor like it was in the Philippines, but in America he was poor and Filipino. He feels rage over realizing that the lives of dogs were given more importance than Filipinos. He feels an affinity towards African-Americans after he was nearly lynched himself. He sees an America torn between kindness and cruelty with the cruelty being all he felt in America for so long. After slugging through pages upon pages of abuse and brutalization in the hands of White America, Bulosan reaches a turning point where he realizes it is the isolation that keeps so many immigrants and workers weak — the solution, then, is radical unionism.
The last third of the book is dedicated entirely towards workers’ and peoples’ initiatives. It is a navigation of an emergent consciousness as well as a chronicle of hope despite defeat and disappointment. At the turning point, Bulosan writes:
“America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the black body dangling on a tree…All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate — We are America!’
The old world is dying, but a new world is being born. It generates inspiration from the chaos that beats upon us all. The false grandeur and security, the unfulfilled promises and illusory power, the number of the dead and those about to die, will charge the forces of our courage and determination. The old world will die so that the new world will be born with less sacrifice and agony on the living…”
It is from these assertions that Bulosan and his compatriots launched their activism for livable wages, common decency, liberty, and dignity on American soil (isn’t it so strange that we’re still fighting the same battles nearly eighty years later). As the book speeds into its anti-climactic conclusion, Bulosan, his compatriots, and alongside Mexican farm workers, contend with the struggle of the shifting demands of capitalism and labor, scabs, defection, and those within the movement who seek to weaken it. Even as Bulosan himself is incapacitated by Tuberculosis, he continues to fight the fight through literature and his writing. The movement collapses once or twice before the war brings it to a standstill with many of the Filipino activists signing up to defend the motherland, but even in its failures, it set up the basis for more successful worker movements in the 50s and the 60s.
What Bulosan portrayed in the book masterfully is the struggle for existence is the same in the Philippines as it is in America. Peasants, workers, and the like are forced to give up their common dignity, their humanity, and give in to their basest instincts and impulses in order to live and to feel human. While Bulosan did not express it intently, he recognized the antagonisms between class brought forth by both capitalist machinations and state sanctioned violence. Moreover, Bulosan asserts that there is no true progress in isolation. As long as people are isolated, the ruling class and the State can simply continue to exploit, deceive, and keep the masses ignorant of their revolutionary potential. As Albert Camus stated, there is nothing that brings man together other than shared shame and revolt. Bulosan and the Filipino immigrants felt both.
I completely understand why this book is not taught more in secondary and tertiary levels of education. Yet while I understand it, I cannot justify it. I do not know whether or not my sentiments exist in a vacuum, but Filipinos have far too long drowned in American literature. It is easier for a city-slicker in Manila to imagine downtown Manhattan than for them to imagine the swaying of cogon in an empty field on a hot summers day. Easier for them to imagine snow than to imagine the smell of a bamboo patch next to a raging river after it rains. Easier to defend human rights in a foreign land than to defend them right here. Easier to post hashtags defending freedom and dignity than to fight for those stripped of both right below their air-conditioned condominium towers. Bulosan could not have imagined these contradictions in Philippine society and perhaps it was clearer to see antagonisms then that it is now. But his message still rings true.
America is not a place, it is an ideal that even Americans themselves have failed to live up to. It is the ideal that the fledgling Republic hoped for, the ideals that the immigrants strived for. It is not a place, it is an ideal — it is in the heart. This is what Bulosan concluded — as much as I hate it. Yet more than this conclusion, Bulosan also concludes as subtext, the attainment of such an ideal is through struggle, through activism, through relentless demand, through revolt against economic and political condition, through fighting for truth, through rejection of ignorance and obscurantism, through saying no, and through saying enough. To those who struggle against injustice, Bulosan charges us with this,
“We must destroy that which is dying, for it does not die by itself.”
