Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in America Is in the Heart, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Beauty in Despair
Race and American Identity
Education vs. Ignorance
Poverty
Summary
Analysis
During the second week of June, all of the students return to Lingayen, some by oxcart and others on foot. They settle in the small houses along the shores of Lingayen Gulf, where fishermen dock their boats. Carlos stays in the boarding house where his cousin lives, and he gets a job working for the fisherman who owns the house. Fourteen boys live in the boarding house, and next door 15 girls live in a separate house. All are the children of peasant families from nearby towns. A town ordinance forbids people of the opposite sex from living together.
Carlos’s time in Lingayen highlights how difficult it is for him to escape his peasant upbringing while remaining in the Philippines. Although he finds work in the fishing boats and even gets an opportunity to go back to school later, students from peasant families much like his own surround him. Their presence, specifically the presence of girls, eventually forces him to leave Lingayen to seek progress elsewhere..
Themes
Carlos wakes at dawn to board the boat and fish all day. He enjoys working among the rugged fishermen. When the boat returns to shore, the fish buyers are waiting to buy the catch. On his way back to the boarding house from work, Carlos stops to watch the students play at school.
This scene is emblematic of trends that persist throughout much of Carlos’s life. Despite his desire for a formal education, it often remains just out of reach, as he is forced to perform manual labor to survive.
Themes
Carlos’s cousin invites Carlos to go to school with him, and Carlos eagerly accepts. While attending classes, he befriends his cousin’s English teacher, who invites Carlos to his house and gives him a card to give the appearance that Carlos has been attending school for two years. The teacher resents the wealthy Philippine middle class, having spent time in America as a boy only to return to the Philippines to find that his peasant parents had died. Carlos pities the teacher. “Instead of using his experience as an inspiring example to other peasant children,” Carlos observes, “he had turned inward and used it as a weapon of revenge.” Nevertheless, the teacher is kind to Carlos and gives him a copy of the General Intelligence test score sheet to study. Carlos takes the test for fun and gets the highest score in all of Pangasinan.
The English teacher both inspires Carlos and earns Carlos’s pity. Having witnessed American society and value of equality first-hand, the teacher becomes resentful of the social stratification that defines Filipino society. Like many of the Filipinos Carlos will meet in America, the English teacher has turned his bitterness inward, and Carlos finds this trait unfortunately common in Filipinos who believe they cannot contribute to the world in a positive way.
Themes
Word of Carlos’s score reaches the girls in the school and he becomes famous in the town. The teacher laughs about the test but urges Carlos to study seriously. The girls, hoping that Carlos will tutor them, start showering him with gifts of handkerchiefs and washing dishes and clothes in his boarding house. Soon, however, a girl named Veronica demonstrates a hatred of Carlos after he finds a baby abandoned in the schoolyard. When he later finds Veronica burning some of her bloody clothes in the stove, it becomes clear that she gave birth to the baby. The landlady urges Carlos to move away, lest Veronica wrongfully identify him as the baby’s father. He boards the first bus back to Binalonan.
Other than his mother, whose hard work and dedication inspire Carlos from a young age, Bulosan depicts his experience with Filipino women in the novel as often joyous but also constricting. Like his dance with the peasant girls, which goes from joyful to threatening when one girl insists that he marry her, the showering of love he gets from the girls at the school is soon tempered by Veronica’s animosity towards him. Her resentment forces him to leave Lingayen instead of staying in school, and this dynamic exemplifies the way that Bulosan often portrays Carlos’s relationships with Filipino women.
Themes
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