america is in the heart by carlos bulosan analysis

Jubaira’s story is notable for its depiction of the persistence of ideas concerning land tenure, status, and kinship from a time just prior to US colonial rule within a context determined by the increasing inroads of merchant capitalism fostered by the US colonial state. The first text is “Blue Blood of the Big Astana,” a story from the Commonwealth period of US-Philippine history, written by Ibrahim Jubaira, the most-recognized Muslim writer in English from the Philippines. The bulk of the monograph, however, is centered on literatures of the Southern Philippines, a region that is often overlooked within the discipline of Filipino American Studies, and in particular it examines the historical evolution of landlessness, displacement, and war in the Southern Philippines through the close reading of texts produced there.

It begins with a consideration of Carlos Bulosan, perhaps the most prominent figure within the discipline of Filipino American Studies, in terms of the brief appearance of Mindanao in America is in the Heart. This monograph attempts to clarify the relationships of Filipino Americans to the diaspora of Christian settler colonists in Mindanao with the hope of facilitating solidarity between Filipino Americans and the peoples of Mindanao and Sulu.

Ultimately, this article insists that Bulosan calls for an intersectional liberatory praxis that is both anticolonial and anti-capitalist. Furthermore, it is a revolutionary practice that by its very nature resists a toothless multicultural inclusion in state and national history and highlights the racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence of both US neocolonialism and domestic racism. In this way, Bulosan presents us with a potentially expansive model of Filipino political consciousness, a model that is not restricted to a masculine revolutionary practice characterized by a laboring brotherhood. As Bulosan narrates the proletariat struggles of the manong generation, he reveals how the Filipino immigrant's status as racialized labor is also gendered and sexualized therefore necessitating that one's labor activism be defined by an anti-patriarchal and anti-heteronormative stance. The article considers the texts and contexts of America is in the Heart and Bulosan's short story 'As Long as the Grass Shall Grow' to demonstrate how Bulosan's materialist, dialectical analysis also involves an incisive critique of the intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality. This article takes the 2013 passage of California Assembly Bill 123, which mandates instruction on the Filipino contribution to the state's farm workers movement in public education curriculum, as an occasion to analyze the gendered and sexualized dimensions of Carlos Bulosan's literature and labor activism.

America is in the heart by carlos bulosan analysis