Race and American Identity Theme Analysis

In America is in the Heart, Carlos Bulosan struggles to reconcile America’s supposed commitment to liberty and equality with the harsh reality of a racist society that is prejudiced against Filipinos. In Bolosan’s book, American identity is inextricably connected with race, and the country’s majority-white population dehumanizes Filipinos as racial “others.” This allows white people in power to assault Filipinos and deny them basic legal rights, all while still upholding the façade of equality. Initially, Carlos cannot make sense of why some Americans are obsessed with race while others are not. However, his later work as a labor organizer reveals that racism serves both social and economic functions: by dehumanizing Filipinos, white people attempt to reduce them to beasts of burden, whom they force to work in the fields and factories. Bulosan sees American identity as a social hierarchy in which white people dominate over subordinate minority groups—a hierarchy that lets America welcome Filipino immigrants not for their humanity, but for the cheap labor they provide.

Racism upholds American identity as exclusively “white” in numerous ways, including through the legal system. Carlos discusses the case of Roldan v. Los Angeles County, in which California courts determined that a Filipino man could marry a white girl since the state classified Filipinos as “Mongolians” and thus exempted them from anti-miscegenation laws. As Carlos notes, however, white people brought the case to court in order to “degrade the lineage and character of the Filipino people,” and the law was soon amended to outlaw white/Filipino marriages. Carlos and other Filipinos also experience racist discrimination in their everyday lives that prevents them from living as full American citizens. They are forbidden from eating in white restaurants and staying in white hotels. Moreover, most white people will not rent rooms or apartments to Carlos and his friends. “We don’t take Filipinos!” one white woman exclaims. Because their race precludes them from assuming American identity, Filipinos exist as pariahs on the margins of society.  

The connection between race and American identity also forces Filipinos to work the worst, lowest-paying jobs. Like other non-white immigrants groups who came to the American west coast, Filipinos must toil in the fields, slaughterhouses, and fruit orchards for poverty-level wages because they have little access to better jobs. White people resist Filipino efforts to better their situations. Filipinos cannot join labor unions alongside white people, and must instead form independent unions. Carlos recognizes how the “Big Farmers” sow dissent among different ethnic groups to prevent them from recognizing their common struggle against the companies that exploit them all equally. Through his experiences, Bulosan shows that minorities, and particularly immigrants, are often valued not for their inherent worth as human beings, but merely for the cheap labor they can provide.

White society further upholds the racialized conception of American identity by using dehumanizing language that equates Filipinos to animals. When Carlos’s boat docks in Hawaii, a white woman calls him and the other Filipinos “half-naked savages from the Philippines,” and demands that they “ship those monkeys back to where they came from.” Associating Filipinos with animal savagery allows white people to deny them their basic humanity. Throughout the book, many people refer to Carlos as a “brown monkey.” While monkeys and humans are both primates, the latter view the former as nothing more than animals. Thus, identifying Filipinos with simian characteristics allows white people to view them as only vaguely human. They are suitable for American labor, yet not worthy of the American identity. White Americans in the book also believe that Filipinos possess an insatiable, animal-like sexuality that precludes their assimilation into American society. While working in a wealthy white home with Macario, Carlos listens as the white guests insist that Filipino men are “sex-crazy” and “sex-starved,” and therefore a danger to white women. In another instance, a white restaurateur beats a Filipino man for having a child with a white woman. That white people equate Filipino/white relationships with bestiality demonstrates how far they will go to dehumanize Filipinos and deny their rights as Americans.   

The most visceral and extreme way that white people maintain the racial barriers of American identity is through violence. Brutal violence is a common occurrence in Bulosan’s novel, as white people rely upon it to dehumanize Filipinos and other minorities. “I was beaten upon several occasions by restaurant and hotel proprietors,” Carlos writes of his time in San Diego. During Carlos’s earliest years in America, he witnesses white mobs attack Filipino orchard workers, and watches helplessly as police officers enter a gambling hall and shoot a Filipino to death. Violence always lies just beneath the surface of Filipino life in America. Indeed, any time a Filipino character dares to defy white racism by sitting in a restaurant, dating a white person, or simply applying for a better job, white people use violence to force him or her back into a subordinate position.

Carlos is the victim of violence on multiple occasions, most significantly when two racist police officers savagely beat him in a jail cell. The book suggests that America’s reliance on state-sanctioned racialized violence demonstrates its extreme commitment to equating American identity with white identity. Bulosan recognizes how white people’s pervasive use of violence to maintain their racial dominance makes a mockery of the supposed American commitment to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” “Everywhere I went I saw white men attacking Filipinos,” he writes, “it was only when I had become immune to violence […] that I was able to project myself out of it.” So pervasive is violence to the Filipino experience that Carlos must accept violence as “normal” in order to face living with it. 

The connection between race and American identity lies at the heart of Bulosan’s experience as a Filipino immigrant. White society uses both legal and violent means to maintain its racial dominance over Filipinos and other minority groups while also exploiting them for the labor they provide to American agriculture and industry. As a result, Filipinos like Carlos exist within American society, but are not part of that society. Amidst this prejudice, Bulosan vows to help reconcile American ideals with the reality of American life.