Presentation by Dr. Jody Blanco on "America is in the Heart" + book discussion
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If you live in San Diego, chances are you know some Filipino Americans. If you know me, you know at least one. :-) But how much do you know about U.S. - Philippine relations and history and the Filipino immigrant experience? Did you know that America's first guerrilla war in Asia was not the Vietnam War, but rather the Philippine-American War? Did you know that there is a link between the way in which Filipinos were portrayed in the American press during the early 1900s and the lynching of blacks in this country? Did you know that California's anti-miscegenation laws were directed specifically at Filipino men? And did you know that before Latino immigrants became farm workers in the U.S., California's produce was harvested mostly by Filipino men? Furthermore, did you know that these men were treated as harshly as blacks were treated in the South?
If these topics interest you, then please join us for a presentation by Dr. Jody Blanco of UCSD entitled "Becoming Filipino with America in the Heart: Carlos Bulosan and the Lost Generation" followed by a book discussion of America is in the Heart led by yours truly. This event is sponsored by the County of San Diego Filipino American Employees Association (CSDFEA) and the Asian Pacific Alliance of County Employees (APACE). We would be delighted to have members of San Diego International Meet-up attend. If you'd like to join us, please RSVP here:
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A classic of Asian American literature by well-known Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West.
Since its original publication in 1943, America Is in the Heart has appealed to a wide variety of audiences that continue to have differing interpretations of the book’s conclusion. The responses of a 1940s postwar readership reflected a relative innocence bordering on naiveté with regard to American foreign policies. The paranoia of the subsequent McCarthy era may have generated receptions that were less open to Bulosan’s socialist underpinnings. With its republication in 1973 by the University of Washington Press in the midst of anti–Vietnam War protests and progressive student movements, Bulosan’s work was taught in many ethnic studies and other politically progressive classes that utilized America Is in the Heart as a vehicle to reveal social injustices. From the 1970s onward, the classroom use of the book in college courses was diverse, running the gamut from literature to sociology to history to psychology.
America Is in the Heart stands apart from the body of American literature in its form as well as in its content. In its noncompliance with traditional novelistic form, America, which was written about Filipino immigrant experiences of the 1930s, defies inclusion in the traditional Anglo-American canon. With Bulosan’s disregard—perhaps tacit defiance—of novelistic conventions, America stands as a de facto redefinition of aesthetic principles. Moreover, the protagonist’s geographic and emotional journey forces readers to redefine the spatial parameters of the United States, a place in which geography is written on the historical map of imperialism and etched into the hearts of immigrants of color who sought a life framed by falsely sold ideals.
In its accessibility and the seeming simplicity of its narrative style, America can be read as an expression of hope and belief in the United States’ ideals, in spite of the terrible struggles that had to be endured by the protagonist and his compatriots. To gain an appreciation of the narrative’s actual complexity, we suggest that readers adapt a simple reading strategy: be aware of the different voices or vantage points that Bulosan has woven into the book’s narrative. Two distinct narrative voices should be readily apparent to the mindful reader. One is that of an analytical Carlos Bulosan, who has grown wise and politically savvy with hard experience, while the younger voice, Allos (presumably a nickname for Carlos), is bewildered, naive, and prone to questioning the reason for the hardships that befall him and his fellows.
Initially heralded by some as a poignant autobiography, expressing the dreams of downtrodden immigrants of color, America still stands today as both an indictment of twentieth-century American imperialist designs overseas and a testament condemning a pre–World War II domestic regime of racialized class warfare. At its most explicit and compelling level, the book documents how Filipino immigrants suffered brutal treatment in the Anglo-oriented west of the United States before the war, evolving a specifically race- and class-oriented consciousness as a response. However, their evolution of an awareness from a racialized “class in itself” to a “class for itself” was not a linear, orderly, or clear-cut process. It is amazing that Bulosan was able to conjecture both the transnational and global dimensions of the larger working-class Filipino immigrants’ trajectories in terms of conditions at home and conditions abroad. And, as the Southern Poverty Law Center reminds us, for farmworkers these conditions remain as material and compelling today as they have been in the past. Beyond this, America endures because Bulosan was wise enough to know that the path of racialized class consciousness may be a necessary route, but it may also be a provisional one, if we are to truly grapple with the miasmas of global capitalism.
About Dr. Jody Blanco
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John D. (Jody) Blanco is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish and Cultural Studies at the University of California San Diego. He received his BA (with honors) from Arts and Ideas in the Residential College at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and his MA and Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, California. His research interests concern the colonial roots of globalization between the 16th-19th centuries. The contexts that inspire this investigation range from the Spanish empire in the Americas and the Philippines, to the spread of Christianity in the modern period, to the philosophy of modernity and Eurocentrism, comparative forms of imperialism and anti-colonial struggles, and the legal, religious, and racial dilemmas and contradictions of post-colonial societies and states. Jody’s courses engage with these themes in and through the study of Philippine, Latin American, Caribbean, and US minority literatures and cultures (religious, political, and artistic). He is the author of Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth Century Philippines (UC Press 2009; UPhilippines Press 2010); and the translator of Julio Ramos’s Divergent Modernities in Latin America: Culture and Politics in the Nineteenth Century.
For more on Dr. Blanco, please visit his website: http://jdblanco.com/
Presentation by Dr. Jody Blanco on "America is in the Heart" + book discussion