Bulosan, Carlos (1911-1956)
For decades after the death of Carlos Bulosan (1911-1956), his works languished in obscurity and his extraordinary achievements were virtually forgotten. But in his short life, Bulosan rose from an impoverished childhood in colonial Philippines to become a celebrated man of letters in the United States, despite deeply entrenched racial barriers. His books and poems bore unsparing witness to the racism and hardships Filipinos encountered in their adopted home.
While America failed to live up to his dreams, Bulosan continued to lay claim to his vision for the land that rejected him and his countrymen. "America is not a land of one race or one class of men," Bulosan wrote in his autobiography, America Is in the Heart. "We are all Americans that have toiled and suffered and know oppression and defeat, from the first Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to the last Filipino peapickers. America is a prophecy of a new society of men: of a system that knows no sorrow or strife or suffering." The book, when rediscovered by another generation of Asian Americans in the late 1960s and 1970s, would later become an instant classic in the emerging canon of Asian American literature.
