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America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (Washington Paperbacks, Wp-68) |  | Author: Carlos Bulosan
Creator: Carey McWilliams
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy Used: $1.82
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New (31) Used (84) from $1.82
Seller: _beaglebooks_
Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 29984
Media: Paperback
Pages: 327
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 029595289X
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.5209
EAN: 9780295952895
ASIN: 029595289X
Publication Date: June 1974
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
First published in 1946, this autobiography of the well-known Filipino poet 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. Bulosan does not spare the reader any of the horrors that accompanied the migrant's life; but his quiet, stoic voice is the most convincing witness to those terrible events.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
 A Very Ignored Part of History September 14, 2009
Juan A. Ramos
I purchased this book as part of my research for a play I'm considering writing based on the Anti-Filipino riots of 1930 in Watsonville.
My father was Filipino and came to America in his early 20's. He was part of the influx of primarily young, uneducated Filipino men who were lured to America to serve as a primary source of cheap agricultural labor in Hawaii, Alaska and California, from 1924 through 1930.
They were exploited socially, politically and economically, not only by Americans, but by Japanese, Chinese and sadly enough Filipinos who preceded them. White American males, especially those financially strained by the Depression, used them as a scapegoat for the lack of employment, well-being and companionship of available white women.
They were quickly labled the 3rd oriental invasion and the fear tactics used to justify hatred for the Chinese and Japanese were dug up and recycled by the American white majority. Yet unlike their previous counterparts, they could not be easily deported because the Phillipines was a colony of the U.S.A. Yet they had no rights of American citizen. This did not stop them from quickly adapting to the American lifestyle, including clothes, cars and women, despite efforts to keep them poor and segregated. This only increased the tension which exploded in late 1929 and early 1930 culiminating in the shooting death of one unfortunate young Filipino man. And leave it to the American politician to find a way to rid America of such a lesion by quickly authoring laws to do so.
My father married my mother, who is Mexican in 1947. Mexican women were somehow still legally considered "white" by archaic anti-miscegenation laws, so they were married in New Mexico. Like most Filipino men of his generation he never spoke in detail of what he experienced as a young man in this country. There was no indication that it was negative, but his many bouts with depression and his drinking spoke otherwise. I could never understand the silence . . . until I read "America is in the Heart" by Carlos Bulosan.
This book is heart-wrenching. At the height of his misery, he encounters a black man who is astounded that Filipinos experienced the same overt racism as himself. That summed up the book for me. I highly recommend it to any Filipino or Filipino-American. This book will sharpen and sober your perspective on how the road was paved by this particular generation for what we now take for granted. And given the crap that our first bi-racial president has to take from those who feel they own this country simply because of the white color of their skin . . . not much has really changed. And if we don't take a stand and speak up for ourselves, history could easily repeat itself.
A "Must Read" for all Fil-Am Born April 1, 2009
C. MENDOZA (San Diego, CA)
This is a "must read" book for any Filipino-American born person (or anyone who wants to learn of our ancestors' immigration to the U.S.) who seeks authentic words from a Filipino immigrant's perspective of the early 20th century. Mr. Bulosan's stories remind me of my great-grandfather's and grandfather's recollections.
Thank you November 25, 2007
Arlene C. Guerrero (Hawaii)
This book shed some light to me. Mr. Bulosan's story is something I would dearly encourage Filipinos to read and identify their roots.
 Starts off Great and Tails off... November 19, 2007
J. Ferrer
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
The story starts off written really well, and in some parts it seems redundant and rushed with alot of sentences starting off with I. i.e.
i went to the market. i saw some white men beat a filipino guy up. i didn't like what they were doing.
the stories he tells of his family in the beginning of the book are very heart breaking, but after many several chapters it gets redundant. every turn he makes is a bad one and he always ends up in a bad place. i just wondered if the book was worth finishing, and to me it isn't. it starts getting political at the end about unions and labor movements.
A beautifully-told tale of tragedy.... June 10, 2007
D. Pawl (Seattle)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I first read AMERICA IS IN THE HEART as a young teenager in high school. Writer Carlos Bulosan goes the semi-autobiographical route to re-examine some of the most painful memories of his life, starting as a youth in the Philippines up to his last days on the West Coast of the United States. Carlos Bulosan, born on November 24, 1913 in Pangasinan, Philippines, came from a very poor background. His family had no choice but to work, collectively, while he and his siblings toiled in the fields of Pangasinan, and abroad in the United States, just so they could [barely] subsist on their earnings and scrap by.
The main character, Allos, must relocate to the United States, to find work in various odd jobs (including the canneries of California and Washington state). He is faced with racism from all sides--Caucasians, exploitative Chinese and Japanese bosses, and just about everyone else. The darker your skin, the harder the discrimination fell on workers of the 1930s and 1940s. This came with strict laws again miscygenation. If you were Filipino, just speaking to a White woman could get you in a lot of hot water. Yet, in the face of all of this pain, Allos becomes involved as a labor organizer and demonstrator for the rights of exploited laborers. What's more, he meets and is reunited with friends and family, over the course of the story, and even finds friendship with a Caucasian woman, Mary.
AMERICA IS IN THE HEART beautifully recounts the pain that faced countless laborers who arrived in the United States to bring in income for their families, in their countries. Many of the passages read like poetry, yet remain very accessable to people for whom the concept of the plight of migrant workers is a fairly foreign concept. Great reading.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
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