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
As Carlos lies in the dark ship steerage, he wonders why he left home and what will become of him in America. He sneaks out of steerage with other passengers to sun himself, but the first-class passengers complain and force the Filipinos back into steerage. Soon, a meningitis outbreak hits the people in steerage. The waiters refuse to bring the steerage passengers food, and the environment is unbearably hot. Carlos befriends another young man from Pangasinan named Marcelo, and when the ship docks in Honolulu, the epidemic is checked and they are allowed to leave steerage. A young American girl sees the Filipinos lying in the sun and calls them “half-naked savages.” She demands that those “monkeys” be shipped back where they came from.
Carlos’s poverty follows him even after he departs the Philippines by forcing him into the filthy and hot steerage compartment. His experience with the racist American woman in Hawaii also foreshadows what will be the defining dynamic of his relationships with white Americans: that of racial resentment. The woman dismisses the Filipinos’ humanity by calling them “monkeys.” Carlos will hear this term frequently in America, and his first taste of American racism comes before he even reaches the American mainland.
Themes
In June, Carlos arrives in Seattle with only 20 cents and finds a hotel in the Filipino district on King Street. Marcelo receives a telegram informing him that his brother has died in California. The hotel proprietor tells the Filipinos that because they have no money, they will be sold for $5 each to work in the Alaskan fish canneries. At the cannery, the drunken contactor threatens the workers’ lives if they fail to obey his orders. There, Carlos befriends Conrado Torres, a journalism student at the University of Oregon, and Paulo Lorca, a law school graduate from Los Angeles. Both men want to unionize the cannery workers, who endure filthy bunkhouses, dangerous working conditions, and company henchmen who violently suppress union activity. The company also skims Filipino workers’ wages.
Having arrived in Seattle penniless, Carlos learns firsthand that work in America can be just as brutal and exploitive as work in the Philippines. Carlos’s job in the fish cannery is a form of indentured servitude, but it also represents his introduction to the idea of organized labor and the struggle to unionize Filipino workers in America. His time at the cannery is a kind of baptism by fire that helps chart the course he will eventually take as a Filipino laborer in American society.
Themes
One day, a woman named La Belle who often associates with Conrado and Paulo accuses Conrado of being the father of her new baby. A local official tells Conrado he must marry La Belle and stay on the island for seven years, as required by law. Paulo then claims, falsely, that the baby is his and agrees to stay on the island himself. It is the last time Carlos sees Paulo.
This incident demonstrates that people are capable of great acts of loyalty and kindness even in the most harrowing of circumstances, as Paulo sacrifices his own freedom to help Conrado. It also represents a turning point in the plot. After he is released from the cannery, Conrado will play an important role in the union movement later in the novel.
Themes
