Carlos Bulosan
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Carlos Bulosan (born to Ilocano parents in Pangasinan, Philippines on November 24, 1913, died in Seattle, Washington on September 11, 1956) was a Filipino American novelist best-known for the semi-autobiographical America Is in the Heart.
He was active in labor politics along the Pacific coast of the United States and edited the 1952 Yearbook for ILWU Local 37, a predominantly Filipino American cannery union based in Seattle. There is some controversy surrounding the accuracy of events recorded within America is in the Heart. He is celebrated for giving a "Third World" perspective to the labor movement in America and for telling the experience of Filipinos during the 30' and 40's.
In the 1970's, with a resurgence in Asian/Pacific Island activism, his writings were discovered in a library in the University of Washington leading to posthumous releases of several unfinished works.
His other novels include The Laughter of My Father and the posthumously published The Cry and the Dedication which detailed the armed Huk Rebellion in the Philippines.
As a progressive writer of labor struggles, he was blacklisted by the FBI due to his labor organizing and socialist writings. Denied a means to provide for himself his later years were of hardship and flight. He died in Seattle suffering from an advanced stage of bronchopneumonia. He is buried at Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.
[edit] Sources
- Bulosan, Carlos (1995). The Cry and the Dedication. Temple University Press.
Carlos Bulosan was born in the Philippines in a rural village of Mangusmana, near the town of Binaknan (Pangasinan province, Luzon Island). His home town is also the starting point of his famous semi-autobiographical novel, America is in the Heart. Most of his youth was spent in the country side as a farmer, far from the popular author he is known now to be. It is however also at his youth that he and his family were economically depressed by the rich and political elite, one of the main themes that revolve around America is in the Heart.
Like most Filipinos during the time, he left for America on July 22, 1930 at age 17; in the hope of finding salvation from the economic depression of his home. He never again saw his Philippine homeland. No sooner had he arrived in Seattle, was he immediately met with the hostility of racism, forcing him to work in low paying jobs: serving hotels, harvesting in the fields, and even working the in the Alaskan canneries.
After many years of discrimination, starvation and sickness, Bulosan had to undergo surgery for tuberculosis in Los Angeles. The tuberculosis operations made him lose most of the right side of his ribs and the function of one lung. Above this, he recovered and stayed in the hospital for about two years. He also took this time to self-educate himself that would later produce the prolific writer and protective voice concerning the struggles Filipino’s were forced to live in. Years after his fight for reforms in America, he died in Seattle due to an advanced stage of bronchopneumonia. His grave lays in Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.
[edit] Quotes
"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 ... "
"We in America understand the many imperfections of democracy and the malignant disease corroding its very heart. We must be united in the effort to make an America in which our people can find happiness. It is a great wrong that anyone in America, whether he be brown or white, should be illiterate or hungry or miserable."
- from America is in the Heart
