American is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan

Yvette Duarte
November 15, 2010
Book Review #3
HPSC 106
American in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan
What is the American dream? Many people see the American dream as a success; in this book we see a totally different point of view of the American dream. This book is about the semi-autobiography of a Filipino immigrant that came to the United States. We get to see the story of a Filipino immigrant that comes to the United States. In his journey he encounter poverty racism, sacrifices, and he overcome all that Bulosan never loses faith in America, despite all of his hardships. By expanding on a variety of tones, he lets the audience understand his point of view. His usage of past tense also ends up contributing to the overall tone and allows the unfolding of unexpected events. His range from a hopeful and calm tone to a regretful tone ends up delivers the story in a personal perspective.
Bulosan would talk about his infancy in the Philippines, as a peasant child in the Philippines to his days as an itinerant laborer and reformer for the Filipinos in America. He arrived to the United State in 1930 at the age of seventeen. What I learned in his semi-autobiography that Filipinos were also discriminated and often they were often exploited by the contractors and the Chinese and Japanese who owned the gambling housed whorehouses. They were often despised along the west coast and tread as criminal and monkeys. While reading this book I get to realized that every immigrant are treat in a bad way, they are often discriminated and exploited. For example I can related this story to the Hispanic immigrant that they are often discriminated by the people of the same race like the Filipinos are often discriminated by people from there own race. Many immigrants come to America for a “better future”, because they don’t see a future where they are from. So the immigrants come to the United Stated with hopes with the mentality that they will have a job and have all their dream come true, but once they are here they face with a cruel reality, and some immigrants start getting into bad habits.
Bulosan arrived to America, as he explains with a hopeful tone in a promising land, like any other immigrant that arrives to America. He was like other immigrants that arrived in America that appear to be confident, calm and ready to work. But after he founds out that America is not at all it is advertised to be, all his illusions, excitement, peaceful and unrealistic illusion of life goes away. Even though he went through racist attacks, starvation, and sickness, and surgery where he lost most of the right side of his ribs and the function of one lung do to tuberculosis.
"I know deep down in my heart,' he wrote, 'that I am an exile in America...I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit. And this crime is that I am a Filipino in America"' (pg.vii). In this quote he explains what he feels in America. I think that every immigrant that comes to the United State feels this way because they need to be hidden from the police or even from the border patrol. Where I am from and live you see the border patrol there. Some times you see a Highway patrol car with the Border patrol behind them taking an illegal immigrant. In this book I get to see a different prospective of an illegal immigrant because we only see how Hispanic are being discriminated.
Overall what I think about this book was that it was really interesting to read because I get to see a different way to see immigrants, that not only Hispanics get discriminated by their own race. Also at first it was weird of how he still has faith in a country that everything was not in his side. Like even though he went through racism attack, a surgery that basically he was a disable person he never gave up. He felt like an American even if he was just an immigrant. If I was in his situation I would just go back to my country or something I would have done and would lose hope and faith in this country. But like reading this book American in the Heart a book that tells what he been through, made me admire him and know that even if bad happened to you, you don’t have to loose hope.