Bulosan, Carlos 1911-1956

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BULOSAN, Carlos 1911-1956

PERSONAL: Born November 24, 1911 (some sources say 1913 or 1914), in Binalonan, Pagasinan, Philippines; died of tuberculosis-related poor health September 13, 1956, in Seattle, WA (some sources say Los Angeles, CA); immigrated to the United States, 1930.

CAREER: Laborer, union activist, fiction-writer, and poet.

WRITINGS:

Letter from America (poetry), The Press of J. A. Decker (Prairie City, IL), 1942.

(Editor) Chorus for America: Six Philadelphia Poets (poetry), Wagon and Star Publishers (Los Angeles, CA), 1942.

The Voice of Bataan (poetry), New York Publishers (New York, NY), 1943.

The Laughter of My Father (short-story collection), Harcourt, Brace (New York, NY), 1944.

The Dark People, 1944.

America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (autobiographical fiction), Harcourt, Brace (New York, NY), 1946, with introduction by Carey McWilliams, University of Washington Press (Seattle, WA), 1973.

Sound of Falling Light: Letters in Exile (correspondence), edited by Dolores S. Feria, [Quezon City, Philippines], 1960.

The Power of the People (novel), edited by Epifanio San Juan, Jr., 1977, National Book Store (Metro Manila, Philippines), 1986.

The Philippines Is in the Heart: A Collection of Short Stories, edited and introduced by Epifanio San Juan, Jr., New Day Publishers (Quezon City, Philippines), 1978.

Selected Works and Letters, edited by Epifanio San Juan, Jr., and Ninotchka Rosca, Friends of the Filipino People (Honolulu, HI), 1982.

If You Want to Know What We Are: A Carlos Bulosan Reader (short stories, essays, and poetry), edited by Epifanio San Juan, Jr., West End Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1983.

Bulosan: An Introduction with Selections, compiled by Epfanio San Juan, Jr., National Book Store (Metro Manila, Philippines), 1983.

The Power of Money and Other Stories, Kalikasan Press (Manila, Philippines), 1990.

On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings, edited and with an introduction by Epifanio San Juan, Jr., Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1995.

The Cry and the Dedication (historical fiction), edited and with an introduction by Epifanio San Juan, Jr., 1995.

All the Conspirators (novel), Anvil Publishing (Pasig City, Philippines), 1998.

Stories and poetry published in numerous magazines, including Town and Country, Poetry, Harper's Bazaar, and New Yorker. Some works have been translated into several languages.

SIDELIGHTS: Carlos Bulosan, one of the "first wave" of Filipinos to immigrate to the United States during the 1930s and 1950s, is considered the foremost Filipino expatriate writer. His avowed aim was to "give literate voices to the voiceless." Before completing secondary school, he left his hometown on the northern island of Luzon in the Philippines at the age of seventeen, following his brothers, Aurelio and Jose, to the United States in search of the American Dream. Having saved enough money for a steerage class passage, he landed in Seattle at the beginning of the Great Depression. Contrary to his dream, he found jobless Americans selling pencils on street corners and thousands of Filipino immigrants living in poverty and squalor in an atmosphere of racial hatred. His writings centered on articulating a Filipino identity in a country that espoused brotherhood and equality but that perceived Filipinos as the "yellow horde" who worked for a pittance, taking employment from whites. During the 1940s and 1950s, his work received considerable notoriety; however, because of his activism, he was blacklisted by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the anti-communist movements of the 1950s and died in poverty and obscurity at the age of thirty-nine. Not until America Is in the Heart: A Personalized History was rediscovered and republished in 1973 would his work be placed among classic Asian-American literature.

Bulosan was one of several children of farming parents. According to some sources, after arriving in the United States Bulosan endured some difficult years as a laborer on farms and in fish canneries from Alaska to Southern California. However, according to other sources, including Elaine Kim in her critical essay in Asian-American Literature, this concept is only partially accurate, having arisen from the experiences of the narrator in his autobiographical yet fictional work, America Is in the Heart. In actuality, one of Bulosan's legs was two inches shorter than the other, and his slight stature and frail health limited his ability to undertake strenuous manual labor. According to John Fante's introduction to America Is in the Heart, Bulosan was "an outstanding child-man … a tiny person with a limp … a Filipino patriot, a touch of the melodramatic about him, given to telling wildly improbable stories about himself." Painful and disheartening to Bulosan, who lived the rest of his life in the United States although never becoming a citizen, was the American attitude toward his countryfolk. He once wrote: "In many ways it was a crime to be a Filipino in California. I came to know that the public streets were not free to my people."

P. C. Morantte, in his Remembering Carlos Bulosan: His Heart Affair with America, noted that Bulosan was at once full of love and hatred for America, loving the freedom the country offered immigrants but hating the way it treated the poor and downtrodden. By reading a vast range of literature, including novels and short stories from authors such as Thomas Wolfe, Hart Crane, and Sherwood Anderson, Bulosan improved his English and began to write. While working as a dishwasher in Los Angeles, he met labor organizer Chris Mensalves. Together, they organized the United Cannery and Packing House Workers of America (UCAPHWA), and Bulosan began writing for a union paper and editing the cannery worker's union publication. In 1952 Mensalves arranged for Bulosan to become the UCAPAWA yearbook editor, the income from which supported the writer until his death four years later.

Writing became a means of self-definition for Bulosan and an outlet for expressing his rage at the treatment of migrant workers. In 1938 he embarked on another course of self-education: After being diagnosed with tuberculosis and kidney disease he underwent three operations to remove lung lesions, necessitating a three-year hospital convalescence where he became acquainted with two young liberal literary women who brought him books. He claims to have read a book a day, by authors such as Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, John Steinbeck, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway. He began writing poetry and short stories, although not until World War II, when the Philippines became the center of attention during a key battle in Bataan, were his stories published. The Saturday Evening Post paid almost $1,000 for "Freedom from Want," an essay illustrated by Norman Rockwell and displayed in San Francisco's Federal Building. Other works were published in Town and Country, Poetry, Harper's Bazaar, and the New Yorker. The Laughter of My Father, a collection of short stories, was broadcast around the world to U.S. troops, while Look magazine rated America Is in the Heart one of the fifty most important American books ever published.

In his writings, Bulosan combines myth and fact to create a sense of authenticity. Initially, he called The Laughter of My Father, his first work translated into several European languages, a collection of modernized folktales; later he wrote to a friend saying he intended them as satire. Petronilo Bn. Daroy noted in an essay in Asian-American Literature that Bulosan's inspiration for these stories came after reading Arabian Nights, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Andersen's Tales, Aesop's Fables, and Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Daroy quoted Bulosan as having written: "These books stimulated me to go back to the folklore of my own country. I discovered with amazement that Philippine folklore was uncollected. … This discovery gave me impetus to study the common roots of our folklore, and upon finding it in the tales and legends of the pagan Igorots in the mountains of Luzon … I blazed with delight at this new treasure. Now I must live and integrate Philippine folklore in our struggle for liberty!"

Daroy noted that Bulosan was an autobiographical author in a mode similar to D. H. Lawrence. "His works are not only closely based on the events of his life," wrote Daroy, "but are also proximate to his social and political views." Daroy commented that The Laughter of My Father, important in that it signified the direction of Bulosan's future work, is a book in which "the misery of the workers rings with the authenticity of his [Bulosan's] voice and is pervaded with his personal emotions. … This act of personal appropriation of the experiences of the underprivileged is everywhere in his writings, even in the most explicitly nonfictional ones, like the stories in The Laughter of My Father."

America Is in the Heart is a fictional immigrant narrative in which Bulosan again integrates personal experience with the universal struggle experienced by his countryfolk in both their native and adopted homelands. Oscar V. Campomanes and Todd S. Gernes commented in MELUS that "Bulosan created a worker/writer/narrator so that he could realize a fictive union with his compatriots. … Read as a collective biography of an oppressed minority, the book shows how Bulosan's alternative aesthetic dissolves the formal barrier between the writer and the work, and functions with a strategy for confronting the narrator's sense of cultural fragmentation and alienating historical experience."

Like Kim, Daroy pointed out, however, that the personal experience of Bulosan in the fictional autobiography is, in several ways, dissimilar to that of Bulosan the author. The narrator is a laborer from a poor, feudal family that lives in a "little grass hut"—a family ultimately forced to separate because of poverty. In reality, Bulosan's family was of the provincial middle class and lived in a large wooden home. His brothers are depicted as rather stupid laborers who, upon reaching the United States, sink to a life of crime and vice. In actuality, they were hardworking, upstanding individuals—one became a school teacher, one a town mayor, and one immigrated to the United States where he became financially successful. By exaggerating his familial situation, Bulosan effectively constructs a realistic, Filipino peasant identity. "In writing about himself, Bulosan meant to imply the condition of the working class, so that what happened to him must be understood as a particular instance of the general pattern of events in a worker's life," wrote Daroy.

Roland L. Guyotte, writing for Journal of American Ethnic History, commented that America Is in the Heart and On Becoming Filipino—a collection of correspondence, short stories, poems, and essays—reflects Bulosan's self-conscious awakening to his Filipino identity, an awakening that occurred in the United States. Guyotte commented that America Is in the Heart is a "master narrative of class struggle, a 'definitive' politicized interpretation of the 'firstgeneration Filipino immigrant experience.'" On the other hand, The Cry and the Dedication, left unfinished at Bulosan's death, harks back to the Philippines and the peasants' struggle and suffering under colonization, first by Spain and then the United States. The story follows a band of seven guerrilla rebels—men, women, old, young, peasant and intellectual—during the Huk insurrection of the late 1940s and early 1950s as they move from the mountains of Northern Luzon to rendezvous in Manila with a Filipino bringing from the United States money for weapons and medicine. This allegorical and psychological narrative depicts Western attitudes of racial supremacy, the rebellion against which could represent many Third World peoples.

Tim Libretti, in MELUS, commented that The Cry and the Dedication "constitutes Bulosan's powerful recognition of a Third World within the U.S." According to Libretti, the most significant difference between this book and America Is in the Heart is "Bulosan's recognition of the need for national liberation of the internally colonized Filipinos in the U.S. and his realization that … national liberation is necessarily an act of culture. … If America Is in the Heart is a narrative of coming to class consciousness, The Cry and the Dedication reworks that narrative and reconsiders the content of class consciousness. … [with] a recognition that cultural domination reinforces and shapes class domination such that a genuine working-class movement can emerge only after cultural and racial equality are achieved."

Campomanes and Gernes, concluding their critical essay, commented: "Although directed against oppression, his act of writing bore the impulse to build inter-social and cross-cultural bridges of communication, meshing the personal and the social, his life story and the story of the Pinoys, into a complex and enriching synthesis."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Asian-American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1982.

Morantte, P. C., Remembering Carlos Bulosan: His Heart Affair with America, New Day Publishers (Quezon City, Philippines), 1984.

Riggs, Thomas, editor, Reference Guide to American Literature, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Trudeau, Lawrence J., editor, Asian-American Literature, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

PERIODICALS

American Literature, December 2000, Joel Slotkin, "Igorots and Indians: Racial Hierarchies and Conceptions of the Savage in Carlos Bulosan's Fiction of the Philippines," pp. 843-866.

Diliman Review, 1969, Epifanio San Juan, Jr., "Radicalism in Contemporary Philippine Culture," pp. 324-342.

Journal of American Ethnic History, fall, 1997, Roland L. Guyotte, "Generation Gap: Filipinos, Filipino Americans, and Americans, Here and There, Then and Now," p. 64.

Los Angeles Times, September 1, 1985, Carlos Quirino, review of Remembering Carlos Bulozan, p. B4.

MELUS, fall, 1988, Oscar V. Campomanes and Todd S. Gernes, "Two Letters from America: Carlos Bulosan and the Act of Writing," pp. 15-45; summer, 1995, L. M. Grow, "The Laughter of My Father, a Survival Kit," p. 35; winter, 1998, Tim Libretti, "First and Third Worlds in U.S. Literature: Rethinking Carlos Bulosan," p. 135.