the text was all but erased from cultural memory.
It remained out of print until the 1970s.
The book’s subtitle, “A Personal History,” and
the numerous similarities between the narrative
and the author’s life helped initially to label the
book an autobiography. This label remained until
the 1973 republication of the text, when critics
began to complicate the application of this term
after discovering that the text’s first-person nar-
rator was actually constructed as a strategic rhe-
torical device. While all of the events described in
Bulosan’s “autobiography” are indeed fact-based,
the text tells the story of an entire diaspora of
Filipinos on the West Coast of the United States,
not just Carlos Bulosan alone. For this reason, the
work is more accurately described as “fictional au-
tobiography.” This unique genre was useful in al-
lowing Bulosan to tell stories similar and related to
his own—a method that reveals the systematic na-
ture of oppression. Even as Allos’s name changes to
“Carlos” in America, Bulosan offers a narrative far
beyond the scope of one man’s self-retrospection.
Once readers understand the author as separate
from his narrator, we begin to appreciate the bril-
liance involved in structuring the nonlinear, often
contradictory narrative of decolonization that is
Allos’s story.
Following the landmark 1972 study by Epifanio
San Juan, Jr, which reintroduced Bulosan onto the
intellectual scene, the University of Washington
Press republished America Is in the Heart in 1973
with a new introduction by Carey McWilliams, the
noted writer and farm workers’ rights activist who
had been a close personal friend of Bulosan. This
republication generated a reception that posed a
distinct contrast to that of the 1940s. Instead of
being read as an avowal of the United States as
the land of equal opportunity, the social critique
woven throughout the work was now interpreted
as a subversive call to action. While this new in-
terpretation had displaced the earlier readings of
the text, it certainly did not erase them. Bulosan’s
social critique could not be severed from his seem-
ingly contradictory celebration of the American
dream. In order to make sense of these contradic-
tions, critics began to revisit the book’s significant
yet previously under-acknowledged “Part One,”
which details the narrator’s experiences with co-
lonialism during his formative years in the Philip-
pines. Critics such as Oscar Campomanes argued
for the necessity of reading Filipino-American lit-
erature as “postcolonial,” or inextricably bound to
its colonial past. America Is in the Heart began to
take on new significance when read as a critique of
U.S. politics, both at home and abroad.
Allos’s life in the United States is marked by
repeated contradictions between his fervent belief
in the American dream and his growing under-
standing of the limitations of that dream. These
contradictions are uniquely valuable, as they dem-
onstrate the schism between his education and
his awareness of his lived experience—the schism
between “colonial education” and “colonial sub-
jectivity.” The disconnection between the colonial
promise and Allos’s inability to reap the rewards
of this promise creates ambiguities in the narra-
tive that account for the contradictions in the text.
Allos, a young boy with a strong sense of idealism,
believed in the promises touted by U.S. propagan-
dists, promises that served to create a disjuncture
between memory and reality. In the United States,
however, he struggles to realize the difference be-
tween the real America and the America that re-
mains only “in his heart.”
In order to survive, Allos realizes he must rec-
oncile his colonial and postcolonial memories
of place and home. He therefore develops a new
vision. America is no longer a land or a nation.
Instead, it is now “in the hearts of men that died
for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that are
building a new world. America is a prophecy of
a new society of men: of a system that knows no
sorrow or strife or suffering. America is a warn-
ing to those who would try to falsify the ideals of
freemen” (189). In the end, America Is in the Heart
does more than provide a collective history or a
fictionalized autobiography; it challenges America
to live up to its own promises.Bibliography
Alquizola, Marilyn. “Subversion or Affirmation: The
Text and Subtext of America Is in the Heart.” In
Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspec-
tives, edited by Shirley Hune, Hyung-Chan Kim,America Is in the Heart 15