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 describes Marian’s death as “one of the darkest periods of [his] life.” He turns to drinking to numb the pain of the loss before he finally boards a bus. On the bus, he meets two girls named Rosaline and Lily, and together they sing popular songs. The girls invite him to stay with them at their home in Medford, in the forested part of Oregon. Carlos decides to stay at a hotel there instead. He has dinner at the girls’ home and swims with them in a lake that reminds him of the clear pool where he and his father once swam years ago. The next morning, he bids farewell to Lily and Rosaline, and heads to Seattle.
Marian’s tragic death sends Carlos into a spiral of alcoholism before he again meets women who recuse him from despair. His brief time with Rosaline and Lily serves as a healing period in which he’s able to begin fulfilling Marian’s dying request. Following his time with the girls, he once again seeks out the other source of potential beauty in his life: the labor movement back in Seattle.
Themes
In Seattle, Carlos meets Conrado Torres in a restaurant. Conrado tells him that Japanese contractors have been union-busting the local Filipino cannery workers. Soon, Dagohoy, who started the cannery union, enters the restaurant with two other union officers. While in the restaurant, assailants shoot and kill Dagohoy and his friends. Carlos feels somehow responsible for the deaths, and laments that “this violence had a broad social meaning […] it was perpetrated by men who had no place in the scheme of life.” Carlos then goes to San Francisco and meets Mariano in Salinas, where he learns that workers have formed the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA). The new union gives him hope.
The death of Dagohoy and the others at the hands of hired assassins represents a watershed moment in Bulosan’s novel. Up to this point, the meaning of the violence that has plagued his life has puzzled Carlos. Although he understood that this violence stemmed from racism, the roots of racism itself remained a mystery, Dagohoy’s death, however, makes Carlos realize that those who commit racial violence do so as a means to assuage their own inadequacies, and to shift the blame for those inadequacies onto to others.
Themes
In Los Angeles, Carlos again finds Macario, who is staying with Victor. He also meets a woman named Dora Travers, who tells him about the Young Communist League and urges him to join. Carlos is apprehensive about joining but appreciates Dora’s company. That night he writes a poem about Dora after watching her sleep, and she encourages him to write more poetry. Inspired, Carlos realizes he can “fight the world now with [his] mind, not merely with [his] hands.” His health, however, begins to decline, and a doctor informs him that he has tuberculosis. Carlos now fears he will experience a slow death like his brother Luciano did.
Carlos is rather uninspired by the Communist Party, but Dora is yet another woman who gives him true inspiration and will to continue pursuing his dream. His newfound dedication to the beauty of poetry stems from the beauty he observes in Dora, suggesting that any kind of beauty can have profound positive consequences. This begins a new period of intellectual growth for Carlos, as he commits himself to continuing to write even in the face of a life-threatening diagnosis.
Themes
