Cabusao / Introduction 662

Forum Kritika: Reflections on Carlos Bulosan and

Becoming Filipino

INTRODUCTION

Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao

Department of English and Cultural Studies, Bryant University
[email protected]

About the Author

Forum Kritika guest editor Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao is an Associate Professor
in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University
(Smithfield, Rhode Island). During the 2006-2007 academic year, he was a Mellon
Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at Kalamazoo College
(Michigan). He received a 2011 Early Career Educator of Color Leadership
Award from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). His teaching
and research focus on US Ethnic Studies (specifically comparative approaches
to Asian American and African American Studies), Cultural Studies (literary and
cultural theory, critical pedagogies), and Women’s Studies (feminist movement
and social change).

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Fig. 1. Carlos Bulosan with his American friend Dorothy Babb, 1940s. Courtesy of E. San Juan,
Jr. and the Philippine Cultural Studies Center

In spite of everything that has happened to me in America I am not sorry that

I was born a Filipino. When I say ‘Filipino’ the sound cuts deep into my being
– it hurts. It will take years to wipe out the sharpness of the word, to erase its
notorious connotation in America. And only a great faith in some common goal
can give it fullness again. I am proud that I am a Filipino. I used to be angry, to
question myself. But now I am proud.

Carlos Bulosan to Dorothy Babb –

July 22, 1942 (Sound of Falling Light:
Letters in Exile)

IT HAS BEEN NEARLY TWENTY YEARS since the twin publication of Carlos
Bulosan’s On Becoming Filipino and The Cry and the Dedication (Temple
University Press, 1995), both edited by E. San Juan, Jr. – a pioneering Bulosan

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scholar and a leading cultural theorist of a generation of intellectuals that “turned

to culture to reshape radical thought.”1 On Becoming Filipino (selected poems,
short stories, essays, and letters) and The Cry and the Dedication (a multilayered
novel inspired by the militant peasant-based Huk rebellion in the Philippines
under Japanese and US occupation) renewed interest in Bulosan among my
generation of Filipino American college students mobilizing to defend and
establish Asian American and Ethnic Studies programs.2 In addition to shedding
light on the diverse body of Bulosan’s writings beyond his 1946 classic ethno-
biography America Is in the Heart (now required reading in Asian American
Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies courses), On Becoming Filipino
and The Cry and the Dedication provide a particular framework of intelligibility
anchored in Bulosan’s unflinching commitment to the self-determination of the
Filipino people. San Juan’s deft editorship of the two volumes enables readers
to appreciate Bulosan’s contribution to the unfinished project called “becoming
Filipino.” This is a project that resists, and is subsequently silenced by, the
formulaic application of dominant theoretical paradigms – postcoloniality,
transnational cosmopolitanism, hybridity, multiplicity, heterogeneity – within
various interdisciplinary fields of study that have domesticated Bulosan for
academic consumption.3
Since US colonial conquest of the Philippines (a result of the Spanish-
American War of 1898) and the violent and horrific US suppression of Filipino
national sovereignty (over one million Filipinos and more than four thousand
US soldiers perished in the Philippine-American War, 1899-1913), Filipinos in
the Philippines and throughout the diaspora continue to engage in the process
of “becoming Filipino” – the process of giving “fullness again” to the word
“Filipino.”4 According to San Juan, “becoming Filipino” refers to ways in which
the “‘becoming’” of a subject claiming to be Filipino” is inextricably intertwined
with the historic subaltern struggle for Filipino self-determination.5 Bulosan’s
body of work provides useful tools that may enable Filipinos today to unlock
their collective potential for change – provided we are able to grasp and critically
engage the relevance of his liberatory vision of freedom.

Paradigmatic Shifts: The Heart of Bulosan’s Homecoming

Emphasizing the concept of “becoming Filipino” within Bulosan criticism
allows us to engage the centrality of Filipino self-determination within Bulosan’s
literary imagination (San Juan, From Globalization to National Liberation, 135-
183). On the one hand, The Cry and the Dedication enables readers to appreciate
the development of Bulosan’s literary craft from the period of the US Popular
Front (America Is in the Heart) to the emergence of Third World Liberation
movements during the Cold War period. On the other hand, the paradigmatic
shift proposed by “becoming Filipino” productively complicates this linear
trajectory of Bulosan’s intellectual and artistic development. The notion of

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“becoming Filipino” illuminates how Bulosan as a deracinated colonized artist

problematizes the discourse of Americanism of the US Popular Front.6 Within
the very narrative of America Is in the Heart (a text divided into four parts),
Bulosan begins the task of developing his final novel The Cry and the Dedication,
which he completed prior to his untimely death on September 11, 1956 in Seattle,
Washington.7
In The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth
Century, American Studies scholar Michael Denning identifies Bulosan’s America
Is in the Heart (1946) as one of the key migrant narratives of the US Popular Front
and “quintessential expression of Popular Front Americanism, a prose version
of ‘Ballad for Americans’” (273). Denning’s study is salutary in that it historicizes
in fine detail Bulosan’s narrative within the “other” America envisioned by
a “broad based antifascist popular democratic front” that developed in the
1930s.8 At the same time, as San Juan suggests, reading America Is in the Heart
as a “glorification of Americanism” obscures Bulosan’s critical awareness of US-
Philippines colonial relations (San Juan 2008). “Becoming Filipino” therefore
provides a useful theoretical lens. It illuminates how a Filipino subaltern
collective memory undergirds that which Denning acknowledges in his reading
of America Is in the Heart – a peculiar tension within the text that seems to
interrogate – if not “subvert and affirm” (to borrow from Marilyn Alquizola) – the
very meaning of “America” (273-277).
At the end of part two, our narrator’s brother Macario, a writer/worker
and labor organizer in Los Angeles, provides a panoramic view of this “other”
America prior to the launching of the 1934 Filipino proletarian literary magazine
The New Tide9 (“the first of its kind to be published by Filipinos in the United
States”):

America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry
boy begging for a job and the black boy dangling on a tree. America is the
illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual
opportunities is closed to him. We are all that nameless foreigner, that
homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that illiterate immigrant and that
lynched black body. All of us, from the first Adam to the last Filipino,
native born or alien, educated or illiterate – We are America! (189)

Macario’s speech dramatizes the multiracial working class solidarity that is

central to the US Popular Front, which “became a radical historical block uniting
industrial unionists, Communists, independent socialists, community activists,
and émigré anti-fascists around laborist social democracy, anti-fascism, and
anti-lynching” (Denning 4). America Is in the Heart documents the participation
of Filipino workers in the US Popular Front, which laid the foundation for
the farm workers movement of the 1960s: historic Filipino labor strikes, the

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Committee for the Protection of Filipino Rights, the Communist Party, the
UCAPAWA/United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of
America (Denning 276). Throughout the text, our narrator is in constant search
of a “common denominator” that could minimize suffering and unite various
oppressed and exploited groups in US society (147). Tim Libretti’s observation of
US Popular Front aesthetics and politics in the text sheds light on this “common
denominator”: “Bulosan’s recognition that Japanese, Mexican, Filipino, and white
workers all shared a faith in the working man and were all fighting a common
enemy, fascism, is a paradigmatic assertion and ratification of the Popular Front’s
internationalism” (26).
Noting the “sentimental, populist, and humanist nationalism” of Macario’s
“We are America” speech and other “America” passages in the text, Denning
suggests that such “rhetorical excess” functions as a “sign of the narrator’s
desperate attempt to transcend a United States of violence, ‘a world of brutality
and despair’” (273-274, emphasis mine). Within the context of “becoming
Filipino,” the rhetorical excess functions as a sign of Bulosan’s desire to transcend
that which could not be fully expressed within the discourse of Americanism –
the brutality of US colonial domination of the Philippines and its impact on the
everyday lives of Filipinos in the Philippines and the United States. What lies
beneath the rhetorical excess of the “America” passage at the very end of the
text (“the American earth . . . a huge heart unfolding warmly”) is our narrator’s
juxtaposing the image of “Filipino pea pickers in the fields” of America with
a memory of Binalonan – the site of familial dissolution and expulsion under
US colonial occupation. This critical distancing within the text highlights the
interconnectedness between Filipino workers in the United States and the
peasantry in the Philippines – both connected by US colonial domination and
a living legacy of Filipino subaltern struggle. This is why Felix Razon is a key
character. Beyond his representing “ethnic Americanism,” the character of Felix
Razon unlocks the significance of “becoming Filipino” within the text and reveals
Bulosan’s critical stance against US colonial control of the Philippines.
We first encounter Felix Razon in part one of the narrative as a young
participant in the Tayug peasant revolt making “impassioned speeches to
harvesters” (59). The 1931 Tayug uprising organized by Pedro Calosa anticipates
the formation of the Huk rebellion in the 1940s (the inspiration for The Cry and
the Dedication). According to historian Renato Constantino, the Tayug revolt
was organized to be “the spark that would ignite the whole of Central Luzon in
a peasant revolution [to] achieve independence for the country” and genuine
agrarian reform (354; see also Pomeroy, 1992). Felix Razon’s reemergence as an
organizer (writer/worker) in Filipino labor struggles in the United States (end
of part two) resonates with the political development of Pedro Calosa, who
participated in subaltern struggles in the Philippines and the Filipino Diaspora.
In addition to organizing the peasantry in the Philippines, Calosa was a worker/

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organizer on the sugar plantations of Hawai’i (Constantino 353).

In part three, our narrator reconnects with Felix Razon prior to his
participation in the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.10

Felix Razon went away. I never heard from him again. Whether he was
killed in Spain I have never found out. He was one of those who gave
meaning to the futilities of other men’s lives – and one who, because he
came from the peasantry, had planted in my heart, the seed of black hatred
against the landlords in the Philippines.
“All right, Felix Razon,” I wrote in my diary when he went away. “You
found no peace. The wise men lied to us. All right, go fight a war on
another continent, like my brother Leon. But if I live I will go back to our
country and fight the enemy there, because he is also among our people . . .”
(240)

Our narrator’s weary admiration for Razon toward the end of the passage
speaks to the paradoxical position of the colonial migrant Filipino artist writing
within and against the discourse of Americanism. How does one write about “the
house I live in” (recall the utopian Americanism at the end of the narrative) when
its construction depends on the colonial occupation of one’s homeland (recall the
painful dissolution of Allos’s family in US occupied Philippines at the beginning
of the narrative)?11 What does it mean that America Is in the Heart was launched
the same year as the passing of the Bell Trade Act which secured the Philippines’
economic dependency on the United States (considered “independence with
strings”)? In developing the Felix Razon character, Bulosan begins to work
through the contradictory position of the colonized Filipino writer in the United
States and provides a glimpse of the direction his craft will take in the 1950s.
Felix Razon’s development in the narrative is significant for several reasons.
First, his character represents the radical subaltern contribution (tradition of
peasant rebellion for land reform and national sovereignty) to Filipino labor
organizing in the United States. Second, his development as a “writer as peasant/
worker” anticipates our narrator’s ability to fuse both sides of his character. Allos
(signifying the Filipino peasantry) and Carl (signifying Filipino migrant workers
in the US) are merged into one through the twin task of writing and organizing
Filipino workers. Third, Felix Razon’s intellectual and political development –
from the Tayug peasant revolt to US Popular Front internationalism – functions
as a catalyst for an “alter/native” shift within Allos/Carl. If Felix Razon, by part
three of the narrative, embodies the common denominator of the US Popular
Front (recognition of fascism as a common enemy), our narrator reconstituted as
Allos/Carl begins to embody the common denominator of “becoming Filipino” –
a recognition of the shared colonial condition of all Filipinos which can only be
challenged by “the political project of national self-determination, the collective

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project of popular, democratic sovereignty” (San Juan, Toward Filipino Self-

Determination 73).
The function of Allos/Carl’s assertion – “I will go back to our country and fight
the enemy there, because he is also among our people” – is twofold. The assertion
to return is an indictment of the US colonial occupation of the Philippines. It is
also a reclaiming of a tradition of subaltern insurgency within his family – “to
understand what it meant to be born of the peasantry” (62). In part one, his father
mentions participating in the revolution as a guerrilla fighter with the Igorot
people: “Someday you will understand, and maybe . . . you will see my Igorot
friends” (26). The shifting of “common denominators” within the text (Allos/
Carl’s “alter/native” desire to return home) is not a disavowal of the multiracial
working class radicalism and internationalism of the US Popular Front. Instead, it
conveys Allos/Carl’s yearning for a deepening of its vision of solidarity, which can
only develop through a critique of the racist ideology of US nationalism and an
understanding of the history of US Empire.
Allos/Carl’s desire to return to the Philippines “to fight the enemy there” brings
to the surface that which is repressed within the narrative and later given fuller
attention in The Cry and the Dedication – the long memory of the peasant-
based struggle for Philippine national sovereignty. In this light, Allos/Carl, the
“writer as peasant/worker,” returns to the Philippines as Dante in The Cry and
the Dedication – a Filipino migrant worker/writer from the United States who
participates in the organized peasant rebellion against colonial occupation. At
the beginning of the novel, Dante is introduced through a conversation between
two characters that represent the continuity of Filipino subaltern resistance from
one generation to the next: Old Bio and Hassim. Old Bio discovers that Dante has
created a form of literature that functions as a repository of Filipino collective
memory. His achievements during the revolution against Spanish colonial rule
are captured in Dante’s book, which “trac[es] our history from the revolutionary
viewpoint, from Chief Lapu-Lapu . . . to the formation of . . . our latest struggle
against tyranny” (5).
Dante’s homecoming as a “writer as subaltern revolutionary” dramatizes
Bulosan’s own literary radicalism as a neocolonial migrant artist during the 1950s
– the Cold War period marked by the securing of US neocolonial control of the
Philippines. In a 1952 essay “Terrorism Rides the Philippines,” Bulosan criticizes
the repression of a democratic movement for national sovereignty and the
collusion of the Filipino elite with US imperialism: “Continued US exploitation
of the Philippines and continued violent attacks on the workers and peasants
have produced the colonial pattern of riches for the few and poverty for millions”
(1952 ILWU Yearbook, 27). As editor of the 1952 Yearbook of the International
Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), Bulosan affirms his belief
in the function of writing as a “powerful weapon . . . against the hysteria to
destroy our civil rights and liberties” (21). To be sure, the notion of “becoming

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Filipino” reveals two central concerns of Bulosan that run through America Is
in the Heart and The Cry and the Dedication: 1) the task of the Filipino writer
and artist to dramatize the emergence of Filipinos as subjects in revolt; 2) the
task of examining the role of cultural production within movements for social
transformation.12

Culture and Consciousness: Bulosan, Writing,

Historical Cross Currents
When viewing America Is in the Heart through the lens of “becoming Filipino,”
we become conscious of the ambitious scope of Bulosan’s literary imagination
and his deep concern about the social responsibility of the writer. Far from
functioning purely as documentary, America Is in the Heart examines the
formation of a unique Filipino peasant-worker subjectivity (embodied by the
Allos/Carl character). Not unlike his African American contemporary Richard
Wright, Bulosan experimented with literary form and content to explore the
national implications and radical potential of a subaltern consciousness.13 In
America Is in the Heart, Bulosan leans upon while simultaneously pushes against
the conventions of naturalism as a way to articulate the emergence of a new
form of Filipino collective consciousness that shuttles between the Philippines
and the United States.14 Through narrative techniques of naturalism, Bulosan is
able to shed light on the hostile social, economic, and historical forces (“outward
influences”) that violently overdetermine the lives of multiple characters in
the narrative: from the disintegration of Allos’s family in the Philippines to the
disintegration of the lives and bodies of Filipino migrant workers exploited,
maimed, shot, and lynched on the plantations and canneries of the US West
Coast.15
Allos/Carl bears witness to the ways in which characters are “shaped” (and
misshapen) by the “crushing forces of poverty and degradation” in the Philippines
(absentee landordism exacerbated by US colonial occupation) and in the “new
environment” of the United States (racist economic exploitation of migrant
workers). “Thrust into a world of brutality and despair,” Allos/Carl is in constant
“flight from fear.” For Allos/Carl (as it is for the central African American
characters in Richard Wright’s “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” and Native Son)
fear is utilized as a mode of individual survival within exploitative and oppressive
social systems (see Campomanes and Gernes, 1992).16
Through an experimental blending of proletarian realism (Michael Gold’s
notion of working class literature with a social function) and Filipino collective
memory, Bulosan is able to disrupt this mode of representation by dramatizing
the narrator’s transition from individual modes of survival (constant flights
from fear within “a world of brutality and despair” – parts one and two) to
participation in collective working class forms of agency (merging of Allos and

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Carl, peasant and worker -- parts three and four).17 The tool our narrator uses to
imagine ways of contributing to collective struggles against labor exploitation in
the United States and colonial occupation in the Philippines is his critical form
of literacy – his ability to read and write about social forms of injustice within the
“belly of the beast.”

I felt that it was the end of another period of my life. I could see it in my
reaction to the passing landscape, in my compassion for the workers in the
field. It was the end of a strange flight.
I bought a bottle of wine when I arrived in San Luis Obispo. I rented
a room in a Japanese hotel and started a letter to my brother Macario,
whose address had been given to me by a friend. Then it came to me, like
a revelation, that I could actually write understandable English. I was
seized with happiness. I wrote slowly and boldly, drinking the wine when I
stopped, laughing silently and crying. When the long letter was finished, a
letter which was actually a story of my life, I jumped to my feet and shouted
through my tears:
“They can’t silence me anymore! I’ll tell the world what they have done to
me!” (180)

While America Is in the Heart has been considered autobiography (“a personal
history”), its innovative form and content stubbornly resists the boundaries of
this particular categorization. Carey McWilliams states, in his introduction, that
America Is in the Heart “reflects the collective life experience of thousands of
Filipinos” during the 1930s and 1940s (vii). Dolores Feria asserts that America Is
in the Heart is a “composite of Filipino experiences” in the United States and the
Philippines (“Carlos Bulosan: Gentle Genius” 58). Michael Denning likens its
structure to nineteenth century African American slave narratives that provide
“portraits of a collective condition” (The Cultural Front 274). The narrative
functions, as San Juan suggests, as a Filipino ethno-biography (a unique genre
of Filipino writing) in which a collective subaltern consciousness of Filipinos
in the Philippines and the United States is explored through the experiences of
our individual narrator (Allos/Carl).18 When America Is in the Heart is read in
relation to The Cry and the Dedication, we realize that Bulosan uses writing as
a weapon to “tell the world what they have done” to Filipinos as a whole – as a
racially and nationally subordinated people.
“Becoming Filipino” is a multifaceted project of liberation. “Becoming Filipino”
refers to the process of obtaining national sovereignty – the ability of the
Filipino people to determine their own future free from colonial and neocolonial
domination. In the artistic hands and creative imagination of Bulosan, “becoming
Filipino” also refers to the responsibility of the Filipino “writer as peasant/worker”
to contribute to the formation of a collective Filipino subject in revolt. The realm

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of culture then becomes a significant terrain of struggle. It enables Bulosan to

explore the interconnected contradictions of two class societies – the United
States as colonial power/racial formation and the Philippines as US colony/
neocolony. In his critical examination of social and historical contradictions,
Bulosan explores, to borrow from American Studies scholar George Lipsitz, “new
ways of knowing and new ways of being” Filipino.
Just as Allos/Carl in America Is in the Heart explores the relationship
between the creation of literature and the developing Filipino labor movement
in the United States, central characters in The Cry and the Dedication provide
opportunities to reflect upon the creation of alternative forms of culture. The
futility of certain cultural forms – the breaking of Linda Bie’s flute and the burial
of Dante’s book with his bodily remains – opens a space for readers to consider
the necessity of creating new forms of “Filipino alter/native art” that are able to
tap into the “whole culture” of the Filipino people, which includes the radicalism
embedded in an oral tradition of Filipino storytelling and a durable tradition of
Filipino subaltern revolt for genuine agrarian reform and national sovereignty.19
In a letter to his friend Jose De Los Reyes on November 2, 1949, Bulosan
expressed his desire to delve into an experimental literary project that could
dramatize the turbulent unfolding of “becoming Filipino.”

Perhaps the time has come for me to give this book to the world. I owe it to
the Filipino people. But this is only one of a series of four novels covering
100 years of Philippine history. This one I am working on now covers 1915-
1950. One will cover the period from the birth and death of Rizal. Another
from his death to the outbreak of the first war. And the fourth will cover
1951-1961, which I consider will be a great crisis in Philippine history. And
there you have the whole panorama of my project.
[T]he pressure for a novel about the Philippines at this stage of human
civilization is demanding. And I am sensitive to historical currents and
cross-currents. I hope I am right. (Sound of Falling Light 258-259)

“Sensitive to historical currents and cross-currents,” Bulosan’s anticipated

fourth novel spanning 1951-1961 would speak to the crisis over Philippine
national sovereignty and the strengthening of US imperialism in Asia. The
US-backed suppression of the Huk rebellion and imprisonment of Filipino
nationalists such as Amado V. Hernandez in the late 1940s and early 1950s
paved the way for the intensification of US neocolonial control of the Philippines,
which was indispensable to securing US military and economic interests in Asia
(Schirmer and Shalom 105-123; San Juan, Toward Filipino Self-Determination
75). The US military bases in the Philippines – Clark Air Base and Subic Naval
Base – were instrumental to the US military during the Korean War in the early
1950s as well as during its interventions in “Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and the

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India-Pakistan-Bangladesh war” between 1965-1975 (Schirmer and Shalom, 140).

Bulosan the “writer as peasant/worker” who never claimed US citizenship and
never returned to his hometown of Binalonan in Pangasinan left our planet in
1956 before completing his set of historical novels on the Philippines.20 Needless
to say, the project of creating innovative forms of culture that contribute to the
process of “becoming Filipino” (in its totality and complexity) is an ongoing one.
Perhaps a new generation of Filipino artists, intellectuals, and activists will push
Bulosan’s vision forward.

Forum Kritika: Archival Anchors, Art as Practice,

Collective Consciousness
This Forum Kritika on Carlos Bulosan presents a collection of new essays that
builds upon the interconnected themes of cultural production (writing and art)
and the collective project of “becoming Filipino,” which are central to several
landmark publications that introduced Bulosan’s writings to readers in the
Philippines and the United States: Dolores Feria’s edited collection of Bulosan’s
letters titled Sound of Falling Light: Letters in Exile (1960); E. San Juan, Jr.’s Carlos
Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle (1972); The Philippines Is in the
Heart (a collection of Bulosan’s short stories on the Philippines, edited by E. San
Juan, Jr., 1978); Amerasia Journal special feature on Carlos Bulosan (introduced
by E. San Juan, Jr., 1979); Selected Works and Letters (Bulosan collection edited by
E. San Juan, Jr. and Ninotchka Rosca, 1982); If You Want to Know What We Are:
A Carlos Bulosan Reader (selected writings by Bulosan edited by E. San Juan, Jr.,
1983); and Susan Evangelista’s Carlos Bulosan and His Poetry (1985) (Ordonez,
“Remembering Carlos Bulosan”; San Juan, Toward Filipino Self-Determination 63).
The editors of these pioneering introductions were, not unlike Bulosan, “sensitive
to historical currents and cross-currents.” Their interest in Bulosan was informed
by mass movements for change in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s
(Asian American movement, Black liberation, farm workers movement, women’s
movement, anti-war movement) and the development of Third World Liberation
movements around the globe, especially in the Philippines. The pioneering
efforts of these editors, scholars, and activists paved the way for the University
of Washington Press’s reprinting of America Is in the Heart in 1973 and the Alive
Magazine publication of Power of the People in 1977 (Ontario, Canada) – in the
midst of the Asian American movement in the United States and a developing
mass movement in the Philippines against martial law declared by Ferdinand
Marcos on September 21, 1972.21
In light of the world-historic struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, it is clear to see
why Bulosan’s work and artistic vision was relevant. This Forum Kritika, divided
into three sections, seeks to explore Bulosan’s relevance for today. The first
section features essays that turn to archival research to historicize Bulosan and,

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in the process, discuss his relevance in the age of US global terrorism and mass
surveillance. The second features essays that provide personal reflections and
academic interrogations in order to examine the relationship between Bulosan’s
art and social transformation in the Philippines and the United States. The final
section reflects on Bulosan’s contribution to the formation of a collective sense of
national belonging for Filipinos.

***

Our first section titled Archival Anchors: Approaches to Historicizing Carlos

Bulosan features two essays by leading Bulosan scholars E. San Juan, Jr., Marilyn
C. Alquizola, and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi. Engaging in archival research, all three
authors provide a paradigmatic shift in our approach to understanding Bulosan.
In a previously published essay titled “Revisiting Carlos Bulosan” in Toward
Filipino Self-Determination: Beyond Transnational Globalization (TFSD), San
Juan suggests that in order to fully grasp Bulosan’s ethico-political project of
“becoming Filipino,” one must examine more closely the latter part of his career:
1946 to September 11, 1956. San Juan considers this Bulosan’s “breakthrough.”
Although FBI surveillance of Bulosan intensified during this period of rampant
anticommunism, he sustained his commitment to movements for social justice
in the United States and in the Philippines. Embodying the Allos/Carl character
(writer as peasant/worker) of America Is in the Heart and the Dante character
(writer as subaltern revolutionary) in The Cry and the Dedication, Bulosan
during this period “return[ed] to labor-union activism as editor of the ILWU
1952 Yearbook,” deepened his work with progressive intellectuals and activists
such as Josephine Patrick (member of the Committee for the Protection of the
Foreign-Born and Communist Party USA), and strengthened his commitment to
Philippine national sovereignty (San Juan, TFSD 75-76).
Emphasizing the importance of engaging archival documents as a way to
historicize Bulosan and his craft, San Juan’s contribution to the Forum Kritika
titled “Excavating the Bulosan Ruins” examines the Sanora Babb archive at
the Harry Ransom Center Library at the University of Texas at Austin. His
examination of the Babb materials reveals “Bulosan’s intellectual involvement
with leftists and possibly communist party operatives in the Los Angeles
metropolitan area” (San Juan 2014). San Juan is building upon the historic optic
of Dolores Feria’s pioneering 1960 volume titled Sound of Falling Light: Letters
in Exile – a collection of Bulosan’s correspondence. Of this collection, San Juan
notes: “The gallery of acquaintances named in his correspondence, as well as the
topics addressed in the letters . . . help disabuse us of the imputed peasant naivete
and the hypothesized decline of his powers in the decade before his death on
September 11, 1956” (San Juan 2014).
In their essay titled “Carlos Bulosan on Writing: The Role of Letters,” Marilyn

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Alquizola and Lane Hirabayashi – who recently published groundbreaking work

on the FBI files of Carlos Bulosan and introduced the 2014 edition of America
Is in the Heart – examine two documents from the Carlos Bulosan Papers at
the University of Washington Libraries. Alquizola and Hirabayashi’s reflections
on a letter supporting the 1953 International Publishers’ release of Luis Taruc’s
autobiography Born of the People and a 1955 letter to Bulosan’s colleague
Florentino Valeros in the Philippines reveal how, despite FBI surveillance and ill
health, Bulosan sustained his commitment to the project of “becoming Filipino.”
(Images of both historical documents are included in their essay – courtesy
of the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections.)22 Bulosan’s
signature alongside other progressive intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois,
Jesus Colon, and Howard Fast on the letter supporting Taruc’s autobiography
not only reveals the vast network within which Bulosan developed his literary
craft but also sheds light on his commitment to Filipino national sovereignty
during the 1950s. Bulosan’s The Cry and the Dedication is inspired by Taruc’s
autobiography (published with a foreword by Paul Robeson) which documents
the resourcefulness and militancy of the peasantry in Central Luzon and the
formation of the peasant-based Huk rebellion under Japanese and US colonial
occupations (Schirmer and Shalom 62-66; Feria, “Bulosan’s Power”; Pomeroy; San
Juan TFSD, 76).23
The San Juan, Alquizola, and Hirabayashi essays also provide several key
theoretical interventions that are revisited and advanced in the second and third
sections of the Forum Kritika. San Juan’s essay asserts that in order to grasp
Bulosan’s ethico-political project, one must challenge the immigrant assimilation
paradigm, which continues to dominate Asian American Studies and US
Ethnic Studies. According to San Juan, this paradigm of immigrant assimilation
domesticates, tames, and deradicalizes Bulosan. It transforms Bulosan -- the
“colonized subjugated native” – into a “bonafide immigrant” (San Juan 2014). It
erases the “colonial experience as foundational and definitive for the colonized
artist” (San Juan 2014). It ultimately does the ideological work of US colonial and
neocolonial domination by silencing Filipino subaltern resistance.
The unfortunate persistence of the immigrant assimilation paradigm within
Asian American Studies, US Ethnic Studies, and even American Studies reveals
our profound collective historical amnesia with regard to the US colonial
(and today neocolonial) occupation of the Philippines and its impact on the
incorporation of Filipinos into the United Statesas “deracinated subjects –
without a sovereign country” (San Juan, TFSD 71). In its entry on Bulosan, the
2006 Columbia Guide to Asian American Literature Since 1945 provides no
mention of the US colonial occupation of the Philippines. Subjecting Bulosan
to the immigrant assimilation paradigm, the Columbia Guide provides a one-
dimensional understanding of Bulosan’s coming to voice. In its introduction to
Bulosan, the Heath Anthology of American Literature – Contemporary Period:

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1945 to the Present also provides no mention of US colonialism other than the
presence of “American schools in the Philippines.” Rendering US colonial history
and its impact on Bulosan’s formation as a writer invisible, the Heath anthology
encourages American literature students to focus solely on the narrative
conventions of postwar American literature and the alienation and “otherness” of
Filipino workers in the United States. As a result, they’re denied the opportunity
to learn about Bulosan’s response to US Empire – the development of an
international “Third World” perspective in his writing.24
According to San Juan, “any scholarly comment on Bulosan, or any Filipino
writer for that matter, that elides the enduring impact – the forcible subjugation
and the resistance to it – of US colonial domination of the Philippines is bound
to be partial, inadequate, and ultimately useless” (San Juan, TFSD 66). The
immigrant assimilation paradigm is unable to grasp the specificity of the racial
and national subordination of Filipinos. An extension of genocidal warfare against
Native people in the United States, enslavement of Africans, and annexation of
Mexican land, the racialized and racist US colonial domination of the Philippines
marks a particular stage in the global development of the United States as a
racial polity (Charles Mills; San Juan, Racism and Cultural Studies; Ignacio, et
al., The Forbidden Book). Informed by these historical currents, Bulosan’s goal
as a writer – the writer as peasant/worker – was not to assimilate or to function
as a “goodwill ambassador” bringing good tidings from the Philippines. He
was committed to developing his craft as a weapon in the struggle for social
transformation.
Alquizola and Hirabayashi’s theoretical intervention enhances San Juan’s
earlier discussion of Bulosan’s writing as “minor literature” (Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari’s theory of an alternative genre) in Toward Filipino Self-
Determination (61-84). While San Juan applies the concept of “minor literature”
to Bulosan’s The Cry and the Dedication which he views as “seek[ing] to fulfill the
responsibility to the Other; the Other here conceived as the realm of possibilities,”
Alquizola and Hirabayashi use their discussion of “minor literature” to examine
Bulosan’s correspondence (San Juan, TFSD 77). In their close reading of a letter
to Florentino Valeros, they highlight Bulosan’s unique historical materialist
approach to cultural production.
Based on the passages examined in Alquizola and Hirabayashi’s essay, I
would like to suggest that Bulosan anticipates the insightful historical materialist
approaches generated by Raymond Williams (central figure of British Cultural
Studies), who sought to understand the creation of alternative forms of culture
and corresponding forms of human consciousness. The dialectical interplay
between superstructure and economic base (base as process) reveals the ways in
which hegemony is never a totalizing, static system. Bulosan’s “minor literature”
produced from within the gaps and fissures of US imperial hegemony during the
late 1940s up to 1956 (letters, essays, short stories, unfinished novels produced

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in conversation with a broad network of progressive artists and activists in the

United States and the Philippines) concretizes Williams’s idea of art as practice.
The creation (as opposed to production) and active interpretation (rather than
consumption) of art mediates the formation of new and alternative forms of
consciousness within specific social-historical formations: “The relationship
between the making of a work of art and its reception is always active, and subject
to conventions, which in themselves are forms of (changing) social organization
and relationship, and this is radically different from the production and
consumption of an object” (Williams, “Base and Superstructure” 123).

***

The two essays featured in our second section titled Art as Practice: Teaching,
Transgression, and Transformation combine personal reflection and academic
interrogation to comment on Bulosan’s “art as practice.” Both essays also highlight
the transformative role of teachers in Philippine and US societies. Monica
Feria juxtaposes the intellectual, artistic, and political development of Dolores
Feria – a white American literature professor in the Philippines – with Bulosan’s
development in the United States. John Streamas reflects upon his teaching
Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart to first generation, working class Filipino
American undergraduate students.
Oftentimes when writer-activist Dolores Feria is mentioned within Bulosan
scholarship, emphasis is placed on her groundbreaking collection of Bulosan’s
correspondence – 1960’s Sound of Falling Light. Regrounding theoretical
concepts of marginality and exile within concrete emancipatory struggles for
change, Monica Feria’s “Writers and Exile: Carlos Bulosan and Dolores Stephens
Feria” provides insight into the artistic and political development of Dolores Feria
in relation to Carlos Bulosan. In a passionate tribute to Dolores Feria and her
generation of artists and activists, Monica Feria offers a fascinating view of her
mother’s contribution to the project of “becoming Filipino.” From her marriage to
migrant Pinoy Rodrigo Feria in Mexico in defiance of anti-miscegenation laws in
Los Angeles to her involvement in the underground resistance in the Philippines
and subsequent imprisonment, Dolores Feria is part of a generation of Americans
(which includes William Pomeroy) that transgressed racial and national
boundaries to support the Filipino struggle for self-determination.
While Dolores Feria transgressed beyond the boundaries of the literature
classroom in the Philippines, John Streamas’s “Organic and Multicultural Ways
of Reading Bulosan” brings us back to the terrain of the literature classroom in
the United States at a time when Bulosan has been incorporated into the Asian
American/US Ethnic canon. Pushing against the boundaries of institutionalized
multiculturalism (immigrant assimilation paradigm) and institutionalized
postmodern frames of intelligibility (what Teresa Ebert, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh,

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and Donald Morton call “post-ality”), Streamas theorizes the unique ways
in which Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart speaks to the lived experiences
of first generation, working class Filipino American undergraduates in his
classroom.25 Streamas’s notion of “organic reading” (pedagogical translation of
Raymond Williams’s “art as practice”) enables us to see how Filipino American
undergraduate students are able to engage the emancipatory project of
“becoming Filipino” in Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart. Not yet indoctrinated
by post-ality which interprets the project of “becoming Filipino” as essentialist
(obscuring differences within) or essentially bankrupt (the subaltern “can’t speak”),
Streamas’s undergraduate students are able to see how the liberatory vision of
Bulosan’s narrative resonates with other narratives by writers of color in the
“internal colonies” of the United States.26

***

The three essays featured in the final section of our Forum Kritika titled
Collective Consciousness: Enriching Bulosan’s Vision of Freedom illustrate
ways of renewing the collective project of “becoming Filipino” and open a space
to consider new theoretical approaches to engaging Bulosan after the cultural
turn in the academy and the institutionalization/professionalization of Asian
American and US Ethnic Studies. In an earlier essay “Filipino Writers in the
United States,” San Juan encourages us to turn to Teresa Ebert’s The Task of
Cultural Critique for possible alternative theoretical approaches for renewing
critical practice within the field of Asian American Studies. Pushing against post-
ality, Ebert argues for a methodology that connects cultural critique with concrete
movements for social change:

If cultural critique is going to matter and become more than delightful

entertainment for the cynical, it must abandon the mythologies of
singularity and become materialist. It must become an explanation of
totality and understand the singular in the collective. Cultural critique
becomes critique-al only when it becomes a critique for collectivity and
joins the cultural struggles for social freedom from necessity . . . (Ebert 196;
San Juan, “Filipino Writers in the United States”)

These final essays of our Forum Kritika grapple with the task of articulating an
historical materialist approach to reading Bulosan that allows us to “understand
the singular in the collective.” In the process, our essayists reveal the critique-al
dimension of Bulosan’s radical literary imagination, which functions as “a critique
for collectivity and joins the cultural struggles for social freedom from necessity.”
Like John Streamas’s “Organic and Multicultural Ways of Reading Bulosan”
(previous section), Amanda Solomon Amorao’s “The Manong’s ‘Songs of

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Love’: Gendered and Sexualized Dimensions of Carlos Bulosan’s Literature and

Labor Activism” challenges the limitations of institutionalized multiculturalism
(or “liberalism of the skin” as coined by Asian American Studies scholar Vijay
Prashad) that empties Bulosan’s writings of its radical class politics. Solomon
Amorao argues that a reclaiming of the anti-racist labor radicalism of Bulosan
must also include attention to critical issues of gender and sexuality. Using the
feminist theoretical concept of intersectionality, Solomon Amorao examines
how gendered and sexual violence have historically informed the racial-national
subordination of Filipinos since the inauguration of US colonial violence in the
Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. Solomon Amorao also examines
how Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and short story titled “As Long as the Grass
Shall Grow” articulate a vision for collective liberation rooted within intersecting
forms of solidarity – race, class, gender, and sexuality.
While Solomon Amorao’s essay demonstrates an emerging new direction to
reground theory (concepts such as intersectionality) within concrete struggles
that challenge reified multiculturalism, racism, and US neocolonial domination
of the Philippines, it also begins to open a much-needed space for readers
to reflect upon the possibilities and limitations of knowledges (theoretical
paradigms) produced by the academic industrial complex. Based on recent
publications by Filipina feminist scholar-activists, what may lie ahead for a
critique-al Filipina feminist cultural theory is an engagement with the gains
of second-wave women of color feminism and the women’s movement in the
Philippines. Delia Aguilar’s “From Triple Jeopardy to Intersectionality: The
Feminist Perplex” traces how intersectionality has displaced a systemic critique
of capitalism and imperialism that was central to the concept of “triple jeopardy”
coined by women of color feminists of an earlier generation. Anne Lacsamana’s
pathbreaking Revolutionizing Feminism: The Philippine Women’s Movement in the
Age of Terror interrogates the limitations of contemporary feminist discourse in
her examination of the ways in which the women’s movement in the Philippines
continues to be integral to the project of national sovereignty (“becoming
Filipino”).
Tim Libretti’s “Beyond the Innocence of Globalization: The Abiding Necessity
of Carlos Bulosan’s Anti-Imperialist Imagination” examines Bulosan’s unique
“aesthetic practice [that] grapples with the question of how an individual and
collective consciousness can grasp the systemic processes” of US and global
colonial capitalism. In his reading of Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, The Cry
and the Dedication, and several short stories (“Passage into Life,” “Be American”
and “The Story of a Letter”), Libretti explores how Bulosan’s aesthetic strategies
examine the unfolding of a collective Filipino subjectivity, which is bolstered by
a heightened race, class, and national consciousness. Mapping Bulosan’s literary
approach to dramatizing the “national dimensions of Filipino life both within
the Philippines and the United States,” Libretti’s insightful essay provides a major

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intervention in our understanding of the aesthetics and politics of Bulosan’s rich

contribution to an “alter/native” genre of Filipino writing.27
Pushing against the culture of the academic industrial complex, Michael
Viola (education), Valerie Francisco (sociology), and Amanda Solomon Amorao
(literature) provide our closing essay titled “Carlos Bulosan and a Collective
Outline for Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies.” As a way to revitalize critical
practice within Asian American and US Ethnic Studies, our authors discuss the
ways in which Bulosan informs their work as Filipino American activist-scholars.
The form and content of this essay provide a regrounding of interdisciplinarity
within concrete struggles for social justice in the United States and the
Philippines. As members of the Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective,
our authors produce scholarly work that is informed by the lives and collective
struggle of Filipinos for self-determination: “our objective . . . is not simply . . .
[to] establish an academic subfield, but to participate in the continuing struggle
for a just society . . . challenging dominant ideologies that detach the individual
subject from larger social forces, community formations, and resistant histories.”
Just like Bulosan (the writer as peasant/worker), our authors (scholars as activists)
contribute to the unfinished project of “becoming Filipino.”

***

Although nearly six decades have passed since his death, Bulosan remains
with us. He haunts and challenges us whether we acknowledge him or not.
Like the ghost in the novel Beloved by African American writer Toni Morrison,
fleeting glimpses of Bulosan cause us to reflect upon our collective condition.
Bulosan’s spirit roams the planet as an ever-expanding Filipino Diaspora of
migrant workers (Overseas Contract Workers) exceeds ten million. Flashes of
Bulosan appear in the anger of Filipino Americans (now constituting one of the
largest Asian American groups in the United States) over the trivialization of the
pioneering contributions of Filipino manongs to the United Farm Workers (UFW)
in the recent 2014 film on Cesar Chavez (Ochoa; Adarlo).28 Perhaps Bulosan’s
haunting persists because the Philippines – a US neocolony with a population of
over 90 million ravaged by severe economic inequality, forced migration, political
repression/enforced disappearances, and ecological disaster -- is still in the
painful process of becoming.29 Like the ghost in Beloved that requires a collective
response from the African American characters traumatized by slavery, Bulosan’s
haunting calls Filipinos everywhere to provide a collective response to the shared,
traumatic condition of colonial and neocolonial subjugation. It is my hope that
this Forum Kritika on Bulosan opens a space for reflection on ways to renew our
critical collective practice – one that could transform Bulosan’s haunting into a
liberatory homecoming for all Filipinos.

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Notes
1. Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York: Verso, 2004).
Denning provides a list of major intellectuals of the New Left generation that turned
“to culture in order to reshape radical thought” (81). The list includes the following:
“Roland Barthes, C. Wright Mills, Louis Althusser, Leo Marx, Doris Lessing, Harry
Braverman, Raymond Williams, Betty Friedan, E.P. Thompson, Lucio Colletti,
Amilcar Cabral, Andre Gorz, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, John Berger, Gustavo
Gutierrez, Jurgen Habermas, Noam Chomsky, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Andre
Gunder Frank, Jean Baudrillard, Immanuel Wallerstein, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques
Derrida, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Richard Ohmann, Samir Amin, Stuart Hall,
Alexander Kluge, Antonio Negri, Susan Sontag, Stanley Aronowitz, Fredric Jameson,
Amiri Baraka, Edward Said, Armand Mattelart, Nicos Poulantzas, Wolfgang Haug,
Frigga Haug, Perry Anderson, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Roberto Schwarz, E. San Juan,
Juliet Mitchell, Regis Debray, Etienne Balibar, Walter Rodney, Gayatri Spivak, Ariel
Dorfman, and Angela Davis” (82).
2. Hukbalahap is the term for Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon – People’s Army
Against the Japanese. It later transformed into the HMB – Hukbo Magpapalaya
ng Bayan – Army to Liberate the People/Nation. See Schirmer and Shalom, The
Philippines Reader (1987). See also William Pomeroy’s The Philippines: Colonialism,
Collaboration, and Resistance! (1992).
3. See San Juan’s From Globalization to National Liberation: Essays of Three
Decades (2008). See also San Juan’s Beyond Postcolonial Theory (1998) and After
Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-United States Confrontations (2000).
4. The date for the Philippine American War is generally listed as 1899-1902; however,
extending it to 1913 provides a more inclusive scope of Filipino resistance to US colonial
domination. The Moro Rebellion (Moro-American War) in Southern Philippines
occurred from 1899-1913 – the “second front” of the Philippine-American War. See
chapter 7 (War against the Moro people) of The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-
American War in Political Cartoons (2004), edited by Abe Ignacio, Enrique de la
Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, and Helen Toribio.
5. See San Juan’s introduction to On Becoming Filipino.
6. In The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
(1997), Michael Denning discusses the debate within the cultural left over the meaning
of Americanism (129-132). See also chapter 7 of San Juan’s From Globalization to
National Liberation, which provides a critique – from the perspective of Filipino
subaltern struggle – of “reading America Is in the Heart as a glorification of
Americanism.”
7. In his excellent essay “Revisiting Carlos Bulosan,” San Juan asks us to consider The
Cry and the Dedication as a “sublimated sequel” to America Is in the Heart (Toward
Filipino Self-Determination 79). An early title for Bulosan’s posthumously published
novel was The Hounds of Darkness. Bulosan mentions this in a letter to his colleague

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Florentino Valeros on April 8, 1955. See San Juan’s introduction to the Cry and the
Dedication (1995) and Bulosan’s Sound of Falling Light (1960), pages 272-274.
8. See also Libretti’s“America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan” (2001), pages 26-27
and San Juan’s “Excavating the Bulosan Ruins: What is at Stake in Re-Discovering the
Anti-Imperialist Writer in the Age of US Global Terrorism?” (2014). Chris Vials also
provides a richly detailed reading of Bulosan, US Popular Front nationalism, and the
production, circulation, and reception of Asian American cultural production of the
1930s and 1940s in Realism of the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and
US Culture, 1935-1947.
9. The New Tide was published in the fall of 1934. A proletarian literary magazine with
short stories and poems, it was edited by Carlos Bulosan with the assistance of Felix
Rivers (managing editor) and Chris Mensalvas, Aurelio Bulosan, Julio Mensalvas,
and Felipe Garia (associate editors).
10. In his “Introduction to Carlos Bulosan,” San Juan mentions the significance of the
Felix Razon character in America Is in the Heart – “Felix Razon connects the peasant
uprising in Tayug, Pangasinan with the Loyalist cause in Spain.”
11. See Marilyn Alquizola’s “Subversion or Affirmation: The Text and Subtext of America
Is in the Heart” (2001) for a detailed discussion of this tension within Bulosan’s text.
Also, see Frank Sinatra’s “The House I Live In” (1945), which celebrates Popular Front
Americanism.
12. In the essay titled “In Search of Filipino Writing: Reclaiming Whose ‘America’?” (2004),
San Juan theorizes the construction of Filipino subjectivity within Bulosan’s work as
“subjects in revolt” – subjects that “have refused the conform to the totalizing logic
of white supremacy and the knowledge of ‘the Filipino’ constructed by Orientalizing
methods of American scholarship” (443).
13. In part one of America Is in the Heart, Allos discusses the significance of learning
about the achievements of Richard Wright. His learning about Wright is connected
to his gaining social and political consciousness: “I was beginning to understand
what was going on around me, and the darkness that had covered my present life
was lifting” (71). Compare Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937) and
Bulosan’s essays “The Growth of Philippine Culture” (1951), “The Writer as Worker”
(1955) in On Becoming Filipino and his letters in Sound of Falling Light (1960).
14. In parts two through four of America Is in the Heart, Allos/Carl remembers his
childhood in the Philippines and provides multiple reflections on the Filipino
peasantry–their connection to the land, their oral traditions of storytelling, their
resourcefulness and ability to mobilize against exploitation.
15. For additional information about naturalism (its historical development and
philosophical evolution within American literature), see “The American Background”
(1995) by Louis J. Budd in American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London
edited by Donald Pizer. See also Bulosan’s essays “The Growth of Philippine Culture”
and “My Education” in On Becoming Filipino for an overview of Bulosan’s approach
to writing.

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16. In “Carlos Bulosan and the Act of Writing” (1992), Oscar Campomanes and Todd
Gernes provide a terrific discussion of the relationship between Bulosan’s America
Is in the Heart and Richard Wright’s Native Son. For additional discussion of the
relationship between Carlos Bulosan and Richard Wright see Helen Jaskoski’s “Carlos
Bulosan Literary Debt to Richard Wright” (1996). See also Richard Wright – Black
Boy (Mississippi Educational Television and the BBC ) and Richard Yarborough’s
introduction to Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright.
17. In the September 1930 issue of the New Masses, Michael Gold provides a detailed
inventory of the characteristics and scope of proletarian realism which includes
the following: “Proletarian realism deals with the real conflicts of men and women
who work for a living. Proletarian realism is never pointless. It does not believe in
literature for its own sake, but in literature that is useful, has a social function” (5). See
Bulosan’s essay titled “The Writer as Worker” – “Now culture being a social product,
I firmly believe that any work of art should have a social function – to beautify, to
glorify, to dignify man . . . if the writer has any significance, it should write about
the world in which he lives: interpret his time and envision the future through his
knowledge of historical reality” (On Becoming Filipino 143).
18. In his classic essay “Carlos Bulosan: The Politics of Literature,” Petronilo Daroy
examines how Bulosan uses autobiography as a way to “reconstruct the general
condition of the working class” (197). Susan Evangelista’s “Bulosan as a Third
World Poet,” in Carlos Bulosan and His Poetrydiscusses Bulosan’s approaches to
writing a collective history of Filipinos. See also Marilyn Alquizola’s “Subversion
or Affirmation: The Text and Subtext of America Is in the Heart” for a discussion
of “Bulosan’s narrator/protagonist… constructed out of the composite lives and
experiences of Filipino compatriots in the United States” (199).
19. See chapter 6 of San Juan’s From Globalization to National Liberation for his
discussion of the “Filipino praxis of alter/native writing.” See also Richard Wright’s
“Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937) in which he discusses the responsibility of the
African American writer to explore the “whole culture” of African Americans – “a
culture which has, for good or ill, helped to clarify his consciousness and create
emotional attitudes which are conducive to action. This culture has stemmed mainly
from two sources: 1.) the Negro church; and 2.) the folklore of the Negro people”
(323).
20. Although Bulosan never returned to the Philippines, he continued to be engaged in
the struggle for Philippine national sovereignty through activism in the United States
and correspondence with artists, scholars, and activists in the Philippines. See Sound
of Falling Light and San Juan’s introduction to The Cry and the Dedication.
21. See Glenn Omatsu’s “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation: Asian
American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s” (1994); Asian Americans: The
Movement and the Moment (2001); “Martial Law” in The Philippines Reader: A
History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (1987); and
Dolores Feria’s “Bulosan’s Power, Bulosan’s People” (1991).

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22. We are grateful to Anne Jenner (Pacific Northwest Curator) and the Special
Collections Division at the University of Washington Libraries for permission to use
the following documents from the Carlos Bulosan Papers for our Forum Kritika on
Bulosan (reprinted in Alquizola and Hirabayashi’s essay “Carlos Bulosan on Writing:
The Role of Letters”):
• University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Carlos Bulosan
Papers, MS Collection No. 0581-012 B4 F8, Reel 6. Letter from the Committee
to Sponsor Luis Taruc’s Autobiography.
• University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Carlos Bulosan
Papers, MS Collection No. 0581-012 B4 F8, Reel 5. Carlos Bulosan letter to
Valeros, Jan. 17, 1955.
23. According to Schirmer and Shalom, Born of the People was a collaborative effort
between Luis Taruc and William Pomeroy (Philippines Reader 63). According to
Dolores Feria (1991) and E. San Juan, Jr. (2009), Born of the People was ghostwritten
by Pomeroy. See also William Pomeroy’s The Philippines: Colonialism, Collaboration,
and Resistance! (1992).
24. See Susan Evangelista’s “Bulosan as a Third World Poet” (1985) in Carlos Bulosan and
His Poetry for a discussion of “Third World” aesthetics in his poetry about life in the
Philippines and the United States. See also Margarita Orendain’s “Understanding the
Dynamics of Third World Writing in Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart” (1988) for a
discussion of Bulosan’s writing within the internal colonies of the United States.
25. “Post-ality” was coined by cultural theorist Mas’ud Zavarzadeh in his essay, “Post-Ality
the (Dis)Simulations of Cybercapitalism” (1995). He defines post-ality as “the ensemble
of all practices that, as a totality, obscure the production practices of capitalism –
which is based on the extraction of surplus labor (the source of accumulation of
capital) – by announcing the arrival of a new society which is post-production, post-
labor, post-ideology, post-white and post-capitalist.” See Zavarzadeh, Ebert, and
Morton, eds., Post-Ality: Marxism and Postmodernism. Transformation: Marxist
Boundary Work in Theory, Economics, Politics, and Culture. Volume 1. Washington,
DC : Maisonneuve Press, 1995.
26. 26. See Teresa Ebert’s “Women and/as the Subaltern” in Ludic Feminism and After:
Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism and Terry Eagleton’s After
Theory.
27. 27. See San Juan’s discussion of the “Filipino praxis of alter/native writing [that]
interrogates the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonial’ theory” in From Globalization to National
Liberation: Essays of Three Decades. In chapter six, San Juan provides a mapping of
the politics and aesthetics of a unique alter/native genre of writing in the Philippines.
In many ways, Bulosan’s body of work can be included in this genre.
28. See Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers
Movement (1992).
29. See 2013 Karapatan Year-End Report on the Human Rights Situation in the Philippines.

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