Carlos Bulosan

Philippine-born activist, novelist, and writer

• Born: November 24, 1913
• Birthplace: Pangasinan, Philippines
• Died: September 13, 1956
• Place of death: Seattle, Washington

Best remembered for his international best-selling autobiographical novel, America Is in the Heart, Carlos Bulosan is considered one of the most influential Filipino American writers in literature. He was among the first significant literary voices for immigrant Filipinos, sharing his insights on social, political, racial, and economic inequalities through his writings and his labor movement activism.

Areas of achievement: Activism, social issues

Early Life

Carlos Bulosan was born to Ilocano parents, Simeon Bulosan and Marta Sampayan, in Pangasinan, Philippines, on November 24, 1913. He grew up in a peasant family. Most of his childhood was spent in the rural village of Mangusmana, working as a farmer and vegetable vendor at the local market along with his parents, four brothers, and two sisters. Bulosan’s parents were illiterate, but they knew how to work their one hectare of land, the family’s sole source of income.

Bulosan, whose family referred to him affectionately as Allos, always had a close relationship with his parents and siblings. He contributed to his older brothers’ school fees by taking side jobs to earn extra money. He went door-to-door in his neighborhood and offered to climb coconut trees, earning a payment of one coconut for every five coconuts he successfully picked. At the end of the day, wholesalers would buy all of Bulosan’s coconuts, and he would return to his family with the money. Bulosan showed an interest in learning at a young age. When he was in third grade, he recalls falling from a coconut tree and taking several days to recover, during which time his older brothers read books to him. He became determined to learn how to read, even though he knew that it was unlikely his formal education would last beyond third grade.

Like many poor people in the Philippines, Bulosan grew up dreaming about one day earning a living in the United States in order support his family. He had heard stories of the opportunities available to people who immigrated to the United States. He was led to believe that the United States was a land of opportunity where everyone was treated equally, regardless of race or economic status. Encouraged by the departure of his brothers Macario and Dionisio for California, Bulosan saved his money. After saving seventy-five dollars, he bought a ticket aboard a steamer travelling from the Philippines to Seattle, Washington.

At the age of seventeen, he arrived in the United States on July 22, 1930, with a limited knowledge of English and three years of formal education. Upon arriving in Seattle, he went to work in an Alaska fish cannery, earning thirteen dollars for the entire season. Bulosan soon learned that the idealized America he had heard about differed greatly from reality. Willing to do just about anything to survive, he also took various low-paying jobs, working as a dishwasher, hotel servant, and farm laborer in Washington and California.

Bulosan encountered ruthless racial discrimination. In his writings, he recalls an incident in which the bunkhouse where he slept was set ablaze by a mob. At a pool hall in Los Angeles, California, he witnessed two police officers gun down a Filipino. Filipinos driving cars were routinely stopped and searched by the police. Laws also made it illegal for Filipinos to marry white women. Bulosan once wrote, “I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit. And this crime is that I am a Filipino in America.”

When he was not working, he spent long hours at the Los Angeles Public Library. After several years of struggling from poor health, Bulosan underwent a surgery for tuberculosis in Los Angeles. As a result of the surgery, he lost the right side of his ribs and the function of one lung. During a two-year recovery period, he read one book per day, including the works of socialist thinker Karl Marx, poet Walt Whitman, and novelists Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.

Life’s Work

During his stay in the Los Angeles General Hospital from 1936 to 1938, Bulosan started actively writing. By the 1940s, his writings had appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including the New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Saturday Evening Post, and Poetry. In 1942, he published a book of poems entitled Letter from America. The following year, he wrote Voice of Bataan, his tribute to the soldiers who died fighting in the Battle of Bataan during World War II.

Another key accomplishment for Bulosan occurred after the United States joined World War II. Bulosan was commissioned by the Saturday Evening Post to write the essay “Freedom from Want” as part of the Four Freedoms series, which was published in March 26, 1943. The idea of the Four Freedoms series was devised by the administration of US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The publication of this essay helped to establish Bulosan as a nationally and internationally recognized writer.

Bulosan’s book Laughter of My Father (1944), which he reportedly wrote in twelve days, became an international best seller. This collection of short stories based on Filipino folktales was translated into several languages and excerpted in the New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town and Country.

In 1946, Bulosan published the autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart (reportedly written in twenty-four days), which would become the work for which he is best remembered. In this book, he depicts his experiences of growing up impoverished and economically exploited in the Philippines, followed by accounts of his experiences as an immigrant in the United States. The book remains required reading in many Asian American and Filipino American studies classes in the United States.

Having experienced horrendous working conditions as a laborer, Bulosan became active in the labor movement between 1935 and 1941. He was involved in an effort to organize labor unions as a response to wage cuts, unemployment, and the drive to exclude Filipinos from the unions in the early 1930s. At the height of the anticommunist movement in the 1950s, Bulosan was blacklisted by Senator Joseph McCarthy due to his labor movement organizing activities and progressive writings.

Bulosan never returned to the Philippines. One of his last projects was editing the 1952 Yearbook of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) Local 37, a predominantly Filipino American cannery union. ILWU Local 37 was based in Seattle, Washington, where Bulosan passed away from an advanced stage of bronchopneumonia on September 13, 1956, at the age of forty-four. According to his friend Chris Mensalvas, all Bulosan had when he died was a typewriter, a twenty-year-old suit, worn-out socks, and manuscripts. He is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, Washington.

Significance

By the 1940s, Bulosan had transformed from a working-class laborer to an internationally recognized intellectual, activist, and writer. His life has inspired thousands of Filipino Americans and Asian Americans. What distinguishes him as a writer is that he was a self-educated intellectual, not just a literary author. Moreover, he was a social commentator and political essayist who wrote about the struggle for equality and social justice in the United States. Bulosan used his unwavering strength of mind to expose unjust social structures and their negative effects on Filipino American immigrants. He was committed to safeguarding the civil rights and liberties of immigrants. In explaining the social context of his writing, he wrote in 1955: “The writer who sides with and gives his voice to democracy and progress is a real writer, because he writes to protect man and restore his dignity. He writes 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.”

Seattle mayor Paul Schell inaugurated the city’s Carlos Bulosan Day on October 31, 1999. In 2004, the Carlos Bulosan Heritage Center was opened in Queens, New York, in recognition of the writer’s commitment to the Filipino people. In addition, a permanent Carlos Bulosan Memorial Exhibit has been established in Seattle’s International District.

Bibliography

Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1946. Print. An autobiographical novel recounting Bulosan’s memories of growing up in the Philippines and the horrors of trying to make it as an immigrant in the United States.

---. The Laughter of My Father. New York: Harcourt, 1944. Print. An internationally best-selling collection of Filipino folktale–based comical short stories from Bulosan’s youth. Translated into several languages and excerpted in multiple leading publications.

---. On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan. Ed. E. San Juan Jr. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1995. Print. A compilation of Bulosan’s short stories, essays, letters, and poetry, in which he discusses the struggles of attaining social justice and equality.

Evangelista, Susan, ed. Carlos Bulosan and His Poetry: A Biography and Anthology. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1985. Print. Takes account of Bulosan’s biography and previously unpublished poetry collection.

San Juan, E., Jr. Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle. New York: Oriole, 1976. Print. A critical analysis and assessment of Bulosan’s novel, poetry, and short stories.