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
Faced with the reality of his disease, Carlos wants nothing more than “to get well as soon as possible and go back to the labor movement,” as he finds it “exhilarating” to belong to “something vitally alive in America.” Macario takes a job in a restaurant to earn money and care for Carlos, who resents being too sick to fend for himself. Dora comes often to read poems to Carlos, and she eventually reveals that she is pregnant with Nick’s child and is going back to the Soviet Union, where she was born. She soon disappears from Carlos’s life.
Carlos settles down to begin a long period of recovery from tuberculosis. Meanwhile, Dora’s repeated visits begin a trend of female nurturement that will define his time recovering. During this period, Carlos’s connection to women becomes vital to his intellectual development, again showing how interpersonal connections can be a vital source of inspiring beauty.
Themes
After Dora’s departure, Carlos publishes several of his poems in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. The magazine’s editor, Harriet Monroe, offers him a scholarship and promises to visit him in Los Angeles. He reads the work of other poets and dreams of someday becoming learned enough to “go back to the Philippines with a torch of enlightenment” and “help liberate the peasantry from ignorance and poverty.” Tragically, however, Harriet dies in South America before Carlos can meet her. Nonetheless, one of Harriet’s journal contributors, Jean Doyle, visits Carlos and gives him food. Around this same time, a Hollywood writer named Alice Odell sees Carlos’s poems and writes him to arrange a meeting.
After Dora’s departure, poetry becomes a gateway for Carlos to connect with several other women who provide a sense of beauty and inspiration in his life. Inspired by Dora’s initial urging, Carlos reads the work of more poets, and their work inspires him to bring the beauty of education to the despairing Filipino peasantry. As he reads more and more, women like Alice and Jean become surrogate mothers and teachers who feed and nurture both his body and his mind.
Themes
When Alice and Carlos meet at the public library, they find they have much in common. She comes from a poor farming town in Iowa and, at a young age, watched her father descend into the despair of a gambling addiction. She eventually found herself in Hollywood, where she had an affair with a wealthy man who ultimately left her. Alice has a sister, Eileen Odell, a teacher who followed her to Hollywood. Alice visits Carlos frequently and brings him books and food. Soon, he is transferred to the Los Angeles County hospital, and Alice tells him she is moving to New York. She continues to send him books after she leaves. “She was directing my education,” Carlos writes. While preparing for his first surgery, Carlos writes poems and sends them to Alice.
Carlos finds kinship with Alice Odell, and the a pair share a relationship that resembles one between a student and a teacher, as well as between a mother and a son. As a teacher, Alice brings Carlos books, and as a mother, she brings him food. This connection between physical nutrition and intellectual nutrition highlights the idea that feeding the life of the mind is as crucial to survival as feeding the body. What’s more, Alice’s role in both forms of nutrition suggests that close interpersonal connections are crucial to survival as well.
Themes
