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
Carlos returns to Seattle, where Max Fuega, the company contractor, hands out pay envelopes full of skimmed payments. Carlos is left with only $13. Upon receiving their pay, the rest of the Filipino workers spend it all in the Chinese-owned houses of gambling and prostitution. Carlos tries to avoid these dens of vice and discovers a Filipino dance hall, where he meets back up with Marcelo. Marcelo dances with a girl who cheats him by making him buy more tickets to keep dancing with her. Suddenly, a man strikes Marcelo in the head with a pipe. Several other attendees draw guns and start firing. The lights go out, and Carlos flees into a small church. Outside the church, a truck driver hires Carlos to pick fruit in the Yakima Valley.
America proves to be a deeply unfair place for Filipinos for a number of reasons—in particular, the racial and economic discrimination they experience forces them into situations where they are tempted by numerous vices. This also marks yet another point in the novel where a Filipino woman cheats a man. Like Veronica in Lingayen, the girl in the dance hall indirectly forces Carlos to flee his immediate surroundings.
Themes
In the Yakima Valley, Carlos works with a crew under Corneilo Paez and his “shifty” bookkeeper, Pinoy. White people in the valley resent the Filipino workers and have attacked them on multiple occasions. Carlos becomes acquainted with an old-timer named Julio who has a lot of experience in America. The employer who hires the Filipinos is a kind Frenchman named Mr. Malraux, who lives with his daughters Estelle, Martha, and Diane.
Carlos’s first job following his work at the fish cannery sets a trend in which he stumbles into less than ideal employment. Yet even as he often has to work with devious individuals like Pinoy , Carlos’s various jobs also introduce him to people like Julio, who become lifelong friends. This marks another example of how Carlos is able to find positive aspects of desperate situations.
Themes
One day, Pinoy fails to return with the workers’ paychecks, and a furious Julio punches the bookkeeper and throws him out of the house. “I had not seen this sort of brutality in the Philippines,” Carlos notes, “but my first contact with it in America made me brave.” He recognizes how being surrounded by daily cruelty makes Filipinos in America become cruel in turn, and this realiation hampers his own ability to trust people.
Cruelty born out of poverty and despair is, in many ways, the defining characteristic of American society for Carlos. He notes how he had not previously witnessed such naked brutality in the Philippines despite the fact that his home country was actually experiencing countless violent peasant revolts. This disconnect sheds some light on the way that Carlos may not be a wholly objective judge of the world around him.
Themes
Carlos’s worries prove justified when a mob of white people armed with guns attacks the fruit pickers and the Malrauxs. Carlos and Julio flee the farm and travel on foot through the trees and by morning, they are walking through a desert landscape. In the town of Zillah, some children stone the two men. They arrive at the Yakima River, where they bath and wash their clothes. Julio tells Carlos, “this is the beginning of your life in America.” They decide to hop a freight train for California, and Carlos and Julio become separated when they take different trains. Carlos is sad to lose his friend and hopes to see again someday.
Although this is not Carlos’s first experience with violence in the novel, it marks his first experience with the kind of explicitly racialized violence that becomes common for him in America. Julio’s statement that such violence marks the “beginning” of Carlos’s life in America darkly foreshadows the way racial violence will quickly come to define his daily life.
Themes
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