Carlos Bulosan

Carlos Bulosan was born in a rural farming village in the Philippine province of Pangasinan. His parents were members of the Ilocano ethnolinguistic group. Following centuries of Spanish colonialism, the Bulosans struggled to survive, as large-scale plantations consolidated their hold over peasant lands. Their poverty notwithstanding, Bulosan’s family emphasized the importance of education. Bulosan eventually saved enough money to secure steerage passage to America. He arrived in Seattle on July 22, 1930 at the age of 17. With only three years of formal schooling, Bulosan was broke and spoke no English, so he spent years working low-paying itinerant labor jobs in fields, orchards, hotels, restaurants, and factories. Like most Filipino people in America at the time, Bulosan experienced severe racial discrimination, but he found community with other Filipinos and joined the labor movement that fought to unionize ethnic workers on the Pacific Coast. He also taught himself English and pursued his lifelong passion for writing. In his short life, he wrote poems, short stories, journalistic pieces, and novels. His most famous work is the semi-autobiographical novel America is in the Heart (1946). Bulosan died from tuberculosis at the age of 42, and many of his other works were published posthumously. Today he celebrated as an early postcolonial chronicler of the Filipino experience in America.