Bulosan, Carlos

BULOSAN, CARLOS (1911–1956). When Carlos Sampayan Bulosan landed in the United States in 1930, nearly 100,000 young men like him had been recruited from Filipino peasant villages to run Alaska’s canneries and work the plantations of Hawaii and the West Coast. But while in search of two brothers who had migrated earlier, Bulosan had originally intended to complete his education and become a writer. Indeed, within only two years of his arrival, his poetry was already anthologized by Poetry Magazine associate editor Helen Hoyt in the volume California Poets.

Born on 3 November 1911 to a peasant family with a limited landholding in Binalonan, province of Pangasinan, Bulosan was part of a brood of five brothers and two sisters, all of whom figure in various literary incarnations in his most fabled novel, America is in the Heart (1943/1946) and in his best-selling book, a collection of hilarious and satirical short stories about village life in Binalonan, The Laughter of My Father (1944). The family's limited landholding was sold off to finance the migration of four of the five sons to the United States in the late 1920s to the early 1930s: the eldest Apolonio (the model for the character of Leon in America is in the Heart), Aurelio (who inspired the character of Macario in the novel), Dionisio (who appears as “Joe” in it), and Carlos himself (the protagonist and narrator “Allos” or “Carl”). Only Silvestre (the character “Osong” in the Laughter stories) remained home and never left for abroad.

The 1930s United States was not a time and place to become a writer for oneself. Caught in the resulting maelstrom of the Great Depression, Filipinos (then called “Pinoys”) faced irregular underemployment, exploitation by labor contractors and large-scale growers, unmitigated racism, and vigilante violence. The Tydings-McDuffie Act limited Filipino immigration yearly to fifty in 1934, and the Repatriation Act of 1935 threatened Pinoys with deportation. Bulosan eventually gave up his plan to finish school and helped organize Filipino resistance against these oppressive and discriminatory currents in American society.

Bulosan scholars like Susan Potter Evangelista trace Bulosan’s radicalization to this period, when he had lived with his brothers Dionisio and Aurelio in California and witnessed firsthand the vicissitudes of Filipino migrant life. Indeed, by this time, Bulosan had served as a publicist for the organization of what was later to become the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America. He had also put out a short-lived bimonthly called the New Tide and written scathing pieces for local newspapers addressing the difficult laboring and social conditions of Pinoys. Turning to self-education, he had begun reading intensively at the Los Angeles Public Library, this time with the intent to become a writer for his fellow Filipino migrants.

From 1934 to 1937, strikes led by Filipino workers broke out in the West Coast states, persisting far into the beginnings of World War II. According to Evangelista and later researchers, it was within this period that Bulosan forged his lasting friendship with Chris Mensalvas, an active Filipino unionist based in Seattle. Publishing the New Tide and the work of contemporaries like William Carlos Williams, William Saroyan, and Jose Garcia Villa in it earned him a place in American literary circles of the time and the friendship of socialist writer Sanora Babb. While confined for tuberculosis at the Los Angeles County Hospital from 1936 to 1938, Bulosan read and wrote intensively, guided by Dorothy, Babb’s sister, and encouraged by Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry.

It was from this phase of his life until 1946 that Bulosan began to publish widely. Popular Front politics gave a considerable boost to Bulosan’s publishing and popularity as a writer, especially as the Philippines turned into a major Pacific theater of war in WWII. Bulosan’s poetry collection Letter from America, and an anthology of his own lyric and narrative poems, along with those of fellow Filipino English-language writers Jose Garcia Villa, R. Zulueta Da Costa, and Rodrigo T. Feria, Chorus for America, simultaneously came out in 1942. The Saturday Evening Post commissioned him to write one of the Four Freedoms essays (“Freedom from Want”), with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech and Normal Rockwell’s accompanying and iconic paintings for inspiration, in 1943; the other three essayists were eminent writers Will Durant, Booth Tarkington, and Stephen Vincent Benét. His authorial career peaked with The Laughter of My Father (reprinted twice, translated into several European languages, and broadcast by the U.S. Office at War Information to all fighting men and women worldwide), and his revered ethnobiography of Pinoys, America Is in the Heart.

Bulosan wrote about the plight of Filipinos in the United States and peasants in the Philippines and used himself, his family, and friends as paradigms for the characters who peopled his writing. His autobiographical mode of writing, especially in his fiction, wedded fact and fiction tightly, and sought to symbolically transcend the boundaries that separated him from his ethnic group and peasant heritage. Perpetually sickly, Bulosan was not exactly the itinerant worker-narrator of America Is in the Heart in real life. Also, his early grasp of writing even as a young emigrant had set him on a different track from that of his fellow Pinoys. But once awakened by the Pinoy predicament, which he significantly experienced himself, Bulosan never wavered in his identification with them. In 1943 the Philippine government-in-exile offered him a comfortable sinecure in Washington, D.C. While Bulosan visited the then-ailing president-in-exile, Manuel L. Quezon, he spurned the offer, and elected to remain with fellow West Coast Pinoys in the struggles they were waging to better their conditions.

Bulosan and his late-American colonial migrant generation are now considered as the forbears, and lay out the pattern, for the diasporic and global dispersal of many Filipino overseas contract workers (OCWs) characterizing the present-day Philippines. Bulosan, ahead of his contemporaries, foresaw and developed the themes arising from late-American colonial (and now, highly-globalized) Filipino social predicaments, in an impressive range of his writings, from his labor journalism through his fiction and poetry, to his various political essays. For example, his valedictory essay, “The Writer as Worker,” excerpted from a 1955 letter to friend and Filipino writer Florentino B. Valeros (see Alquizola and Hirabayashi 2014 for a photoreproduction), encapsulates his positioning as a writer to read on these questions beyond his own times, including his own checkered career as an author. In this essay, he clarified the critical work of the writer in the context of his own era, and his own eventual reorientation to become a writer who works to help effectuate radical changes to such a context. He draws up a materialist analogy between writers and workers in this disquisition: “Why should I write about labor unions and their struggle?….a writer is also a worker. He writes stories, for example, and sells them or tries to sell them. They are products of his brain. They are commodities. Then again, a writer is also a citizen; and as citizen he must safeguard his civil rights and liberties.”

Bulosan's radicalism as a writer, or his aspirations for fellow writers to become radical, are further borne out by his contextualization of the times in which he lived:
[T]hese are times that demand of the writer to declare his positive stand – his supreme sacrifice – on the question of war or peace, life or death....[A writer must write] so that this will be a world of mutual cooperation, mutual protection, mutual love; so that darkness, ignorance, brutality, exploitation of man by another, and deceit will be purged from the face of the earth.
A writer should be political also. Government or states are always in the hands of the ruling classes, and so long as there are states, there are also tyrannies. In a bourgeois state, under capitalism or imperialism, the tyranny is against the working class, against the majority.

But he was not merely invested in Filipino writers in the United States like himself and how they should address their alienation from their less fortunate kindred by finding common cause with them. In specifically addressing Filipino writers in the Philippines with this essay, Bulosan explains why and how his own personal aesthetics and politics must take the auto/ethno-biographical expressions that they do:
Filipino writers in the Philippines have a great task ahead of them, but also a great future. The field is wide and open. They should rewrite everything written about the Philippines and the Filipino people from the materialist, dialectical point of view – this being the only [way] to understand and interpret everything….They should write lovingly about its rivers, towns, plains, mountains, wilderness – its flora and fauna – the different tribes and provinces....They should compile the unwritten tales, legends, folklore, riddles, humor, songs, sayings. They should illustrate that there was a culture before the Spaniards uprooted it....The material is inexhaustible. But always they should be written for the people, because the people are the creators and appreciators of culture.

Unable to accept the complex compound of social history and biography in Bulosan’s work, critics on both sides of the Pacific accused him of intellectual dishonesty and commercialism. Previous claims made about Bulosan’s descent into despair in the last years of his life, after a dubious plagiarism charge concerning a short story (which was otherwise settled), have been disputed by recent research. Evangelista points out that it was Chris Mensalvas who asked Bulosan to move to Seattle in 1950 to edit the yearbook of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union Local 37. Bulosan’s writing, as a consequence of this involvement, took on a more decidedly political bent, especially as he continued to participate actively in the collective struggles against labor exploitation, political persecution, and anti-immigrant legislation in the 1950s, and as Filipino labor organizers and their American sympathizers braced for the McCarthy era.

Bulosan died from pneumonia in 1956, leaving behind a trove of fragmentary and finished manuscripts, including a novella on the 1950s communist rebellion and Huk uprisings in the Philippines. The latter, The Cry and the Dedication, was posthumously published in 1977 by ALIVE Magazine as The Power of the People under Epifanio San Juan’s editorial direction, and reissued in an authoritative edition in 1995, bearing the original manuscript title, by Temple University Press. Since the rediscovery, in the 1960s, of his literary and political legacy by labor and student activists, and the robust development, from the 1990s on, of Bulosan criticism by Asian American/ethnic and Filipino studies scholars, Bulosan’s works are now required reading in literature courses in the USA’s leading universities, and have countless critical studies devoted to them (in the form of extended book chapters and journal articles) by American literature professors, and international literary studies scholars from Europe to East Asia.

Alquizola, Marilyn and Lane Hirabayashi. “Carlos Bulosan’s Final Defiant Acts: Achievements during the McCarthy Era.” Amerasia Journal 38.3 (2013), 29-50.

Cabusao, Jeffrey, Editor. Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt: Critical Perspectives on Carlos Bulosan. Lanham, MD: University Press of America Inc., 2016.

Cabusao, Jeffrey, Guest Editor. “FORUM KRITIKA: Reflections on Carlos Bulosan and Becoming Filipino.” KRITIKA KULTURA 23 (2014), 128-276.

Chen, Shu-ching. “Affective Journey: National Emotion in Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart.” EurAmerica 41.1 (March 2011), 47-86.

Espiritu, August. “Suffering and Passion: Carlos Bulosan.” In Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals, 46-73. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Evangelista, Susan. Carlos Bulosan and His Poetry: A Biography and Anthology. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985.

Fuh, Shyh-jen. “Carlos’s American Dream—The Inscription of ‘Self’ in Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart.” EurAmerica 38.3 (2008), 443-472.

Gonzalez, N.V.M. and Oscar V. Campomanes. “Filipino American Literature.” Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Edited by King-Kok Cheung. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Ponce, Martin Joseph. “The Sexual Politics of Carlos Bulosan’s Radicalism.” In Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading, 89-119. New York: New York University Press, 2012.

San Juan, Epifanio Jr. Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1972.