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
Pascual’s condition worsens; he is now paralyzed from the waist down and he is close to death. Before he dies, however, Pascual tells Carlos: “It is for the workers that we must write […] There is no otherway to combat any attempts to suppress individual liberty.” After Pascual dies, Lucille starts a new newspaper in San Francisco while Carlos goes to Los Angeles. There, he finds that his brother Macario and José’s brother Nick have started a literary magazine with Felix Razon, the former Filipino peasant boy whom Carlos met in the rice fields years ago.
Joining Macario and Nick in Los Angeles brings Carlos full circle by connecting his struggles in the Philippines to his struggles in America. At the center of this connection is Felix, who Carlos first met as a bewildered boy in the rice fields. Like Carlos, Felix brought his struggle for social justice to America, and here that struggle brings the two men together in a common cause.
Themes
The men spend much time discussing how to spread progressive ideas throughout California, and Macario impresses Carlos with his newfound dedication to universal equality. Macario explains that the American ideal is yet unfinished, and new immigrants like Filipinos are charged with fulfilling American ideals for themselves and for future generations. “All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate—We are America!” he explains, and declares that “America is a prophecy of a new society of men.”
Macario’s multi-page philosophical lecture closes out the first half of Bulosan’s book, and it provides the thematic link that connects the first two parts to the remaining two parts of the novel. In the first two sections, Carlos struggles internally to reconcile the American paradox. In the next two sections, Carlos joins a more active fight to resolve this paradox, guided by Macario’s point that America is an unfinished ideal that immigrants must help make into a reality.
Themes
