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’s father is now a landless farmer who has become “a pathetic figure in the house.” Meanwhile, Luciano dives deeper into local politics as his lungs get weaker. The fear and uncertainty that have taken over his family make 13-year-old Carlos want to run away. He finally decides to tell his parents that he is leaving. While they are heartbroken over his decision, they also understand it. He settles on going to Baguio but hopes to someday get to America. “It was good-bye to Binalonan and my childhood,” Carlos states. He takes a bus to Baguio, where the roads are smooth and modern and the houses and theaters are built in the Western tradition. Unable to find work in the stores, Carlos falls asleep between two rice sacks.
Father’s loss of the land and Luciano’s declining health spur the first great move of Carlos’s life. Although he is not yet moving to America, he recognizes that he is nonetheless separating permanently from the life he once knew. The city of Baguio represents a sort of gateway to America for Carlos. Its buildings are built in a Western style and the city has an overall modern feel that contrasts with the old and rural Philippine countryside. In Baguio, Carlos also begins working the kind of itinerant jobs that will define his life in America.
Themes
In the morning, Carlos wanders between the vegetable stalls picking up bits of food. When an American tourist pays him to undress for a picture, he makes himself “conspicuously ugly” to attract the attention of any other tourists with cameras. The tourists, however, are more interested in photographing the near-naked Igorot people in the city. Eventually, a ricer trader hires Carlos to transport rice from wheel barrows to his booth. While working that job, he meets an American woman, Mary Strandon, who works in the library. She hires him to cook and clean her apartment. Next-door to Mary lives another American woman who has an Igorot houseboy named Dalmacio. He and Carlos become friends.
Carlos’s introduction to Mary Strandon marks the first of a series of platonic relationships Carlos will have with American women over the course of his life. For Carlos, these women are symbols of beauty and nurturing who arrive in his moments of greatest vulnerability to help nurse him back to health. Mary begins this trend when she rescues Carlos from the streets, gives him a job, and provides him with the opportunity to expand his love for books.
Themes
Dalmacio tells Carlos that English is better than money for those who want to go to America. He begins teaching Carlos to speak English after Carlos agrees to do some work for him. Carlos is thrilled to learn about Abraham Lincoln, a “poor boy who became president of the United States.” Miss Strandon also supplies Carlos with books from the library and soon lets him work with her there. He becomes even more passionate about learning. “Names of authors flashed in my mind and reverberated in a strange song in my consciousness,” Carlos states, adding that “a whole new world was opened to [him].”
America is a constant symbol of hope and advancement throughout Bulosan’s book. In Baguio, Carlos learns about Abraham Lincoln, who embodies the kind of rags-to-riches opportunity that America claims to provide. Lincoln’s life story fuels Carlos’s quest to educate himself through the local library’s collection of books.
Themes
