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
Shortly after Alice moves to New York, her sister, Eileen, begins visiting Carlos nearly every day for three years. Like her sister, Eileen brings Carlos books and various kinds of food. Carlos writes that he “yearned for her and the world she represented.” He writes poems about her and vows to “get well” for her. They also exchange letters when apart, and Carlos uses the process of letter writing as his own personal “course in English.” Eileen gives him several books about politics, history, and society, and he is overjoyed at the opportunity to learn “the great discoveries in the life of man.”
To Carlos, Eileen represents a world characterized by beauty, safety, wealth, love, and education. This world is a stark contrast to the world of despair, poverty, ignorance, and violence that he has known for the majority of his life. The phase that Carlos spends in the Los Angeles Hospital learning about the broader context of his world effectively represents the final phase of his intellectual and moral development.
Themes
Carlos and Eileen grow closer, learning about their mutual hardships, and she “[weeps] silently when [he] suffer[s] pain and loneliness.” For Carlos, Eileen represents the America that is “human, good, and real” because she fulfills his “insatiable hunger for knowledge and human affection.”
In a very crucial way, Eileen comes to embody the vision of America about which Macario lectured at the close of the novel’s first half. She symbolizes the welcoming promise of the American Dream even more so than America itself does.
Themes
As Carlos lies in the hospital, the knee injury he sustained from the anti-union attackers causes him searing pain, and he finds it hard to eat. He observes his suffering roommates as they die painful deaths, and he thinks about how hard it is to die. He undergoes a knee operation, and afterwards, Eileen brings him more books by great authors such as Franz Kafka and Federico Garcia Lorca. The suffering these authors endured further inspires him to overcome his own suffering and become a writer.
Growth and happiness define much of Carlos’s time in the hospital. Even, when he suffers pain, he turns to the suffering of the great authors he admires as a means of keeping the faith that he will one day join them. The hope of expressing his suffering and growth in writing continues to provide Carlos with very real strength, showing the practical power that books and education can have in individuals’ lives.
Themes
One of Eileen’s friends, Laura Clarendon, is writing a proletarian novel with a Filipino protagonist, and Carlos gives her advice on the character. Soon, Felix visits to tell Carlos he is going to Spain to fight the fascist regime of Francisco Franco, and that Macario and Nick are going with him.
After achieving limited success fighting in the American labor movement, Carlos’s friends decide to take their fight against injustice to Spain. Like Carlos himself, his friends crave the opportunity to stand behind an ideal higher than themselves. However, the fact that they have to leave America to have any hope of doing so shows just how deep American racism and oppression run.
Themes
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