America Is in the Heart

A young Filipino boy, Carlos Bulosan, is watching a man emerge from the tall grass that surrounds his family’s rural plot of land in the farming town of Binalonan, in the Philippine province of Pangasinan. The man carries a bundle and appears anxious as he sits down and looks towards Carlos’s small family home. The man seems familiar with the barrio, or village, and an excited Carlos runs across the animal pasture to “the rich piece of land” where his father is using a carrabao, or water buffalo, to plow the field. Carlos’s father asks him why he has been running, and Carlos responds that his brother, Leon, is the man who arrived carrying a bundle. Father insists that Leon is either still off fighting in Europe or perhaps even dead.

Carlos, however, tells his father to look at the stranger when he emerges in the field. Father realizes that the stranger is indeed Leon, and he introduces Carlos to his brother. Leon left to fight in Europe when Carlos was very young, so the two brothers have not formally met until this day. “Welcome home, soldier,” Carlos says to Leon. Leon soon imparts an “affectionate glance” at the water buffalo, takes the rope that tethers the animal from his father, and starts “plowing the common earth that had fed [Carlos’s] family for generations.” Although he has just met Leon, Carlos writes that his brother’s time spent in a distant land will inspire Carlos later in life by providing an “assurance of righteous anger” in the face of the “crushing terror that filled [Carlos’s] life in a land far away.”

It is springtime on the Philippine island of Luzon when Leon returns home to the village. Immediately upon arrival he discards his khaki army uniform, dresses in his old clothes, and joins his family in working the land in hopes of harvesting a “good crop.” During this time, “radical social change” is sweeping across the Philippines. Following years of agitation for independence from Spanish colonial rule, powerful native leaders have gained control of the government and used their advantages in education and wealth to plunge the nation into “economic catastrophe” and stifle the movement for national unity.

The culmination of the Spanish-American War has turned the Philippines into an American colony. The influence of American ideals such as “equality” inspires young people in the peasant provinces to rebel against the hacienderos, or landlords, who control vast plantations where the peasants toil in poverty and abject slavery.

Carlos’s family controls a small, but productive, four hectares of land, on which they raise corn, rice, beans, and animals to ward off starvation. Shortly after his return home, Leon decides to marry a peasant girl from the province of Ilocos Sur. Father is overjoyed at Leon’s decision to get married, and the wedding is multi-day affair full of music, dancing, and lots of food and drink.

Towards the end of the festivities, Leon takes part in a tradition wherein he carries his new bride into their house to find out if she is a virgin. In this “primitive custom” that has “come down to the peasants in the valleys from the hill people,” Leon must release black smoke from the chimney to publicly confirm his bride’s virginity. According to this “cruel custom,” brides who are not virgins must be released back to their villages and are forbidden from marrying again.

When Leon and the wedding party learn that the new bride is not, in fact, a virgin, the party turns into a mob. The mob ties the girl to a guava tree, where the women spit on her and strip her of her clothes. The men then beat her with horsewhips while women and children fling sticks and rocks. An outraged Leon intervenes by “covering her bleeding body with his,” while Father throws himself on them both, pleading with the crowd to stop their assault on the “good, industrious woman.” Eventually, the crowd grows weary and dissipates. Carlos cuts the girl’s ties, and the crying, bleeding girl embraces Leon. Overwhelmed by the scene, Father searches for “an answer in the earth to the unanswerable question in [Leon’s] eyes.”

Soon after the wedding, Leon sells his share of the family property and moves with his bride away from his village. Later, on his way to America, Carlos passes through Leon’s new town and waves to his brother and his wife and children. “It was good-bye to my brother Leon and to the war that he had fought in a strange land,” Carlos writes, as well as a “good-bye to his silent wife and all that was magnificent in her.” Carlos is never able to recall how many children Leon had at his side.