B ul o sa n

Carlos
 CARLOS
BULOSAN
Carlos Sampayan Bulosan
(November 24, 191– September 11, 1956)
• born in the village of Mangusmana in the Philippines
on November 24, 1913.

• English-language Filipino novelist, poet and journalist

who immigrated to America on July 1, 1930 at the age of
17.
• He spent most of his life in the United States, and never
returned to the Philippines.
• He is a central figure in Filipino American history.
 CARLOS
BULOSAN
• He is best known for his semi-autobiographical work
“America Is in the Heart”,
but his 1943 essay on “The Freedom from Want” also
garnered him acclaim

• Bulosan’s works describe the experience of growing

up poor in a rural area of the Philippines, chronicling
social and economic conditions created by the
American occupation and centuries of Spanish
colonialism.
 CARLOS
BULOSAN
• Bulosan’s work captures the “push” factors that
drove his generation to the United States. Like
Bulosan, they hoped to find a better future and
forged resilient and adaptive communities in the face
of an often-hostile and exploitative European
American culture in the United States.

• Many factors conspired to silence Bulosan and

ensure his words and deeds would never be known.

• Bulosan is remembered as a progressive anti-

colonial, pro-labor, humanitarian voice by an array
of communities
 CARLOS
BULOSAN
• This exhibit examines Bulosan and the many overlapping
communities of which he was a part. As a labor organizer
and a self-consciously radical writer, deeply interested in
anti-colonial political struggles ongoing in the Philippines,
Bulosan was hounded by the FBI. Blacklisted, often in poor
health, and unable to work, he lived much of his life in
poverty.

• Bulosan was only 42-45 years old when he died of

tuberculosis-complicated pneumonia in Seattle in 1956, he
left behind a large body of poems, novels, short stories,
plays, and correspondence on a range of related topics.

• Much of his poetry was written into his letters and

correspondence.
WORK
S
Of Carlos Bulosan
 WORK
S
Letter from America
(1942)
In 1942, his book of poems, Letter from America, was published. Bulosan was featured in the 1942 edition
of Who’s Who in America He edited Chorus for America: Six Philippine Poets.
The Voice of Bataan
(1943)
book of poems that serves as a tribute to the soldiers who died fighting in that battle.
Freedom from
Want(1943)
the Saturday Evening Post published four articles on the “Four Freedoms” and one of it is Bulosans work
“the freedom from want”

The Laughter of My Father (1944)

became a bestseller and established Bulosan as an important writer. It was translated into several
languages and excerpts were read over wartime radio. He was praised by fellow Filipinos who “for the
first time are depicted as human beings.”
 WORK
S
America Is in the Heart
(1946)
Is the work that he is best remembered for

As Long as the Grass Shall Grow

expressed his desires to be educated so that he could get ahead of life . Just the
same, Filipinos were subject to discrimination, as a matter of course.

My Fathers Tragedy
The story is about a father and his children who grow up cockfighting more than being a
family.
America i
s
in the
Heart
 America is in the Heart
> speaks to this struggle to retain one's identity in a new world.

>In it, stories loosely based on his brothers’ and friends’

experiences depict an immigrant Filipino’s life in the 1930s
and 1940s. Who endured intense racial abuse in the fields,
orchards, towns, cities and canneries of California and the
Pacific Northwest in the 1930s, reexamine the ideals of the
American dream.

> America is in the Heart has been used as symbol

for the Filipino American identity movement of the
1970s and is included in many bibliography lists for
college courses on Filipino American studies classes.
Additional Information
 Additional Information
Of the million Filipinos who found themselves in the
United States in the two decades before and after World
War II, Carlos Bulosan, his entire life & works,
represents the heroic struggles and sacrifices of the
Filipino community as a colonized and an emergent
national agency in world history.

- E. San Juan Jr., 1999

 GROUP 4
Members:
Ryan Espenida
Keshia Jasmine Camarillo
Marc David Famulagan
Trisha Akilah Dela Cruz
Rhea Gale Sardido