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 meets with Percy Toribio, who is the head of the asparagus workers union and a college graduate who enjoys writing. Carlos asks Percy if his union has attempted to affiliate with the CIO or the AFL, but Percy is afraid of appearing too “radical” for the farmers. Carlos accuses Percy of prioritizing protecting his own job, which ends their conversation and confirms Carlos’s belief that college-educated labor leaders are ill equipped for the job. Later, Claro points to a newspaper headline that warns of a “Filipino Communist” strike leader. Though it does not mention Carlos’s name, a local foreman, Steve Laso, suggests that Carlos should nonetheless leave town. Laso soon drives Carlos to Stockton.
Despite the importance he places on education, Carlos’s experience with Percy shows him that education has its limits when trying to enact real-world change. Percy’s college education has not taught him the courage needed to run a union, again showing how academic learning and real-world experience need to go hand-in-hand when it comes to effecting change.
Themes
In Stockton, Carlos sleeps on a bus and dreams of his family eating dinner. His mother refuses to eat even though she is clearly hungry. Soon, he finds out that his mother will not eat because there is not enough food in the house, and that “she [is] starving herself so that her children would have something to eat.” In the dream, Carlos pretends he is no longer hungry and leaves the house so his mother can eat, and from outside he watches his family laugh and enjoy their dinner.
This dream outlines the most important lesson that Mother taught Carlos before he moved to America: he must put the interests of his community above his own individual interests. The self-sacrifice she demonstrates in the dream is eventually rewarded, and Carlos carries this lesson throughout his life.
Themes
Carlos awakens briefly before he falls asleep again and has another dream. In the second dream, he is sitting in an acai tree watching his mother cook corn with a concerned look on her face. He slides down the tree and starts running. “I wanted to run away from all that poverty,” he writes, but he hates the idea of leaving “the affection in our family.” He runs far away until a police officer finds him and offers him bananas. In the yard of the presidencia, the chief of police shows Carlos a fragrant banana tree and then drives Carlos back to his home, telling him about America on the way.
This dream highlights Carlos’s unresolved feelings about his peasant upbringing. Despite the poverty of such an upbringing, he also remembers the way it bonded him to his loving family. He still feels a lot of guilt about running away from this poverty and leaving his parents and sisters behind, Even in the dream, the temptation of America still linger, showing how powerful the country’s allure remains for those seeking better fortunes.
Themes
The dream continues as the police chief drives Carlos home. When they arrive, Carlos’s father carries him into the house. Inside, his mother assures him: “We have enough food now, son.” Carlos sits down to eat but then runs to thank the man who drove him home, but the man is gone. When Carlos awakens, he realizes that this was not a dream, but the memory of something that actually happened to him as a boy. Carlos describe the incident as “one of the most significant events in [his] childhood.”
The dream ends by helping Carlos reconcile his guilt about going to America with the reason he did so in the first place. The fact that the dream actually happened reveals the roots of Carlos’s fixation on America, since he associated the idea of it with having enough food and escaping poverty more generally. That he has this dream now also suggests that maybe someone does have enough food because of Carlos’s efforts; maybe all his striving for a better world has somehow paid off.
Themes
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