Carlos Bulosan and the American Dream

Carlos Bulosan and the American Dream

America has been known as the “melting pot” due to the continual arrival of immigrants from all over the world that are attracted to the opportunities that thrive in the “Land of the Free” and remain fixated on the shining “American Dream.” Filipinos sightlessly leave their homeland to America in search of creating a better life for themselves and their families, yet many depart unaware of the harmful and extreme circumstances for common unity in America. The emotional and sociological difficulties faced by the Filipino migrants are exhibited in the literary works of Carlos Bulosan. Carlos Bulosan came to America from the Philippines with the hope of finding a better life but his dreams was not to become reality. This paper considers the key ideas and attitudes that led Bulosan to develop his perceptions of the Filipino immigrant experience in the works of "Be American" and "Homecoming."

Carlos Bulosan was born in the Philippines in the rural farming village of Mangusmana, near the town of Binalonan. He was a farmer's son, and he and his family lived in abject poverty, because the American colonization of the islands led to great economic disparity, with a growing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the economic and political elite. Bulosan was determined to help his family and to further his education, so he decided to come to America to fulfill these goals. Bulosan arrived in Seattle, Washington in 1930 and would never return to his homeland. He was seventeen years old and had on three years of education in the Philippines, spoke little English, and was struggling to make ends meet. In order to survive, he took whichever job he could find, including working in hotels, picking crops, and even traveling to the canneries in Alaska, where the fishing company paid him only $13 for a whole season of work. Resuming the life of a poor laborer he experienced much economic difficulty and racial brutality that significantly damaged his health and eventually changed his perception of America. Clearly, America was not the "land of opportunity" that he had hoped for, instead it was xenophobic and violent, rank with discrimination and hatred for those who were different; Bulosan endured several years of racist attacks, starvation, and sickness. The overwhelming fatigue and stress of a migrant eventually wore him down physically and due to advanced lung disease he died in 1956.

The conditions under which he worked, as well as the ongoing discrimination fired Bulosan's determination to fight injustice, and he became a union organizer and a social presence on behalf of working class immigrants. He also became a self-educated and accomplished poet, novelist, and essayist determined to voice the struggles he had undergone as a Filipino coming to America and the struggles he had witnessed of other immigrants. Bulosan narrates the economic hardships and difficulties with assimilation encountered by Filipino immigrants in America, which is why he is greatly remembered and studied today. He came to the U.S. willing to work hard and hoping simply to be able to make enough money to support his family, and instead found a racist society that considered him to be in every way inferior. The theme that runs through his works is largely that of blighted expectations and tremendous betrayal. For instance, Bulosan tries to get a job in San Diego but he is repeatedly beaten by restaurant and hotel proprietors and is refused service at the drugstore. Such violations of individual rights are illegal today, but racial violence, discrimination and anti-miscegenation acts still continue in our society.

His sadness is reflected in his writing. For him, America was both a place and an idea: the idea of freedom. He wrote in part, "America is not a land of one race or one class of men. We are all Americans that have toiled and suffered and known oppression and defeat, from the first Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to the last Filipino pea pickers.” He says that America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom and well as existing in the eyes of men who are building a new world. But then he says that American promises a new society, but America is the illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual opportunities is closed to him. Clearly that "illiterate immigrant" is him, and he understands that many things will not be possible for him, simply because his skin is dark and not white.

Critics have noted that Bulosan appears to have difficulty in dealing with women; his characters tend to fall into the well-known Madonna/whore dichotomy with no "real" women anywhere in between. Bulosan appears to have been so transfixed by his own problems that he failed to recognize the worldwide exploitation of women; the closest he comes to addressing this is in his story