Subverting Immigrant Autobiography in the US

Carlos Bulosan’s “American Is in the Heart” and Louis Adamic

Abstract

This essay attempts to demonstrate how Louis Adamic’s material and intellectual influence, as well as his textual model, contributed to the writing of the Filipino American foundational text, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), a classic of Asian American literature. Starting with the renowned friendship between the two authors and emphasizing Adamic’s support in guiding Bulosan through the ethnic expectations of the US editorial market – with the suggestion of the autobiographical genre –, this essay argues that Bulosan’s employment and subversion of the immigrant autobiography was partly modeled on Adamic’s semi-autobiography Laughing in the Jungle (1932), a heterodox European immigrant autobiography centered on class issues, social struggle, and the deconstruction of the American dream. The essay offers a brief comparative recognition of immigrant autobiographies written by European and Asian immigrants and their different canonical understanding through the classic works by William Boelhower and Elaine H. Kim. Then, drawing from archival materials and intertextual analysis, the essay argues that America Is in the Heart’s structure, the narrator’s skepticism toward assimilation policies and his attachment to the country of origin, are indebted to Adamic’s influence because of formal and thematic similarities with his semi-autobiography. Nonetheless, the US colonial history of the Philippines and the author’s background rooted in rural Pangasinan, set Bulosan’s text apart from both the European American and Asian American autobiographical “traditions” and thus from the model of Younghill Kang – even though the two undergo the same racial prejudice by the editorial market. America Is in the Heart subverts the immigrant autobiographical genre by re-signifying the concept of “America,” juxtaposing American ideals with the harsh realities of violent exploitation and discrimination experienced by Filipino migrant workers. In doing so, it reframes “America” as a symbol of solidarity between racialized workers against the fascist corporate manifestations that worried Adamic in the 1930s.