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
Following Leon’s death, Nick, Nick’s girlfriend Rolla, Macario, and Carlos move to a new apartment on the ironically named Hope Street, in Los Angeles’s red light district. There, “pimps and prostitutes were as numerous as the stars in the sky,” and suicides and murders are “a daily occurrence.” However, it is the only district where the Filipinos can find a room to rent. Carlos wonders if this “narrow island of despair” will “shadow” his “whole life.”
The fact that “Hope Street” is a place defined by crime, despair, and death symbolizes the deeply unfair circumstances in which Filipinos are forced to build their lives in America. The utter hopelessness of “Hope Street” is the only place where they can rent a room. As Carlos observes, Hope Street represents both the physical and social “narrowing” of the Filipino experience in America.
Themes
Meanwhile, Manuel marries a white woman with two children, while Luz and José fight over a Mexican street prostitute one night, and the ugly scene sickens Carlos. Luz eventually dies in a gambling house. Alonzo meets a white divorcee who pays for him to attend college, but police arrest him over the relationship and call him a “brown monkey.” Furious, Alonzo returns to the Philippines and wages an anti-American campaign in the press.
Among the most forceful ways in which white American men enforce racial dominance over Filipinos is trying to control the sexual lives of white women. By forbidding white women from associating with Filipino men, white American society often forces Filipino men into the arms of prostitutes, thereby severing the act of sex from the emotion of love and keeping Filipinos further isolated.
Themes
Carlos’s lease on the hotel room is expiring and he continues to struggle to find work, ushering in “days of hunger and loneliness.” He and Macario move into a small room with Gazamen in the Mexican district. One night, Macario brings in a sickly, starving Filipino named Estevan. He is a writer who has written many stories and essays but has failed to get any of them published. Estevan is the first writer Carlos meets, but the young writer soon commits suicide by jumping out of his window. Carlos takes one of his stories and keeps it with him for inspiration.
Although his appearance in the novel is brief, Estevan serves as a symbol of the two potential futures Carlos might have. Like Estevan, Carlos is passionate about writing and knowledge, but Estevan is unable to use the beauty of his passion to overcome the despair of his poverty. Like Estevan, Carlos will one day have a choice between pursuing his dream to its fulfillment, or succumbing to the degradation that white American society is bent on forcing upon him.
Themes
Macario gets a job cooking and cleaning for a movie director. Carlos joins him one day during a dinner hosted by the director. The rich white people at the dinner disparage Filipinos with racial remarks, calling them “sex-starved,” and dismiss them as uppity for wanting to be educated. One morning, Carlos carries a breakfast tray upstairs and witnesses the lady of the house standing nude. He stares in “ecstasy” at the “onionlike whiteness of a white woman’s body” before turning away. Carlos decides to stop working with Macario at the director’s house, angered at Macario’s “subservience” to people “less human and decent than he.”
Racist white Americans repeatedly characterize racial minorities as sex-crazed and therefore untrustworthy around white women. Although this is a vile caricature, the fact that white women are barred from associating with Filipino men does enhance their allure. Carlos, for example, is entranced when he sees a white woman’s naked body for the first time, as it represents all that is forbidden to him in American society.
Themes
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