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
In Bakersfield, Carlos falls asleep in a Mexican bar and awakens to find Amado staring at him. Amado tells Carlos that he secretly visited him in the hospital and gave him blood. The brothers dine at a chop suey house and, later that evening, Carlos tells Amado about Macario’s poor health. Amado offers to move to Los Angeles and get a job there to care for Macario, and Carlos is overjoyed at his brother’s kindness. “Now I knew that in a strange way we were together again,” he writes. Carlos then goes to Portland and contacts Nick at the local UCAPAWA office. Nick tells him the union is dead. Soon thereafter, Carlos becomes ill and fears he is going to die.
Carlos’s reunion with Amado after a long period of estrangement once again underscores the depth of the family bonds that he and Carlos forged while still in the Philippines. Moreover, Amado’s status as both a loving and supportive sibling and an alienated criminal mirrors America’s status as a place of both kindness and cruelty. This is a fitting parallel, since America made Amado into the man he has become.
Themes
