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
Rumors swirl throughout Luzon regarding the “land question,” and amidst whispers of peasant uprisings against the absentee landlords, Father finally loses his land for good. Like his peasant ancestors, Father believes that “life should be rooted in the soil.” He goes to Lingayen to fight for his farm in the court, but a “poor and ignorant peasant” like him stands little chance against the educated people on the courts. He fails to get his land back and returns home a broken man who resorts to drunkenness. Mother goes to Binalonan and returns with Carlos’s sisters, Francisca and Marcela. It is the middle of the season and “strange men” are showing up in the rice fields. One of them is Felix Razon, a peasant boy who urges revolution among the farmers and tells them to abandon the rice fields. Meanwhile, Carlos works at harvesting rice with Mother, which he enjoys.
In keeping with the novel’s coming-of-age structure, Carlos is able to recognize seismic social changes, but he does not yet know how to deal with them. The brief introduction of Felix Razon, and Carlos’s subsequent confusion over Razon’s urging the peasants to abandon the rice fields anticipates the novel’s later sections. When Razon appears later in the story, he and Carlos become allies united in a common cause to resist the powerful. But Carlos must learn about this cause before he can participate in it, and as a child in the rice fields, he cannot quite recognize this call toward a larger purpose.
Themes
Felix again returns to the rice field and urges the peasants to sell their shares of rice. In response, Mother and Carlos tie their shares of the rice in bundles to their bodies and carry them to the plaza in Tayug. At the plaza, they find that an army of the black-clad, anarchist Colorum Party of peasants has begun laying siege to the city. The rebels overtake the town hall, and Mother, Carlos, and his sisters flee into the bushes. They are unsure of why the rebels are fighting. Eventually, the local constabulary troops defeat the Colorum. The revolt nonetheless has a profound effect on Carlos, who becomes determined to “leave that environment and all its crushing forces” and return later “to understand what it meant to be born of the peasantry.”
Carlos’s first personal experience with the peasant rebellions in the Philippines highlights his limited understanding of the conflict. He knows that the black-clad Colorum Party is revolting, but he does not understand why, and he is puzzled over their ultimate goal. What Carlos does recognize, however, is that in order to understand the chaos that comes with being born a peasant, he must first get away from his peasant surroundings. This realization foreshadows how Carlos’s most important moments of intellectual development will later involve separating himself from the immediate chaos of his surroundings.
Themes
