The pool rooms and gambling houses, dance halls and brothels, were the only places he knew. Romulo, “it carried him into years of bitterness, degradation, hunger, open revolt, and even crime. In Washington, the future author experienced racism when whites torched a bunkhouse where he slept.
He picked apples in Eastern Washington and finally moved south to California to continue the familiar seasonal cycle of picking fruits and vegetables. When Bulosan arrived in Seattle, he was “shanghaied and sold for five dollars” to work in an Alaska fish cannery to earn $13 for the season. Jobs were scarce and competition was intense for whatever was available. The stock market crash of 1929 and the Depression had devastated the country.
Notwithstanding his status as a “national” and not an “alien," Bulosan became quickly disillusioned by the reality of life in the United States. He had not been told that people of color did not enjoy democracy. He paid $75 for passage on the Dollar Line to Seattle, Washington.īulosan had heard how easy it was to earn a living in the United States even as a bellhop or dishwasher. Then in 1906, Filipino laborers arrived in Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations (the beginning of the “Sakada” or plantation worker system).Įnticed by stories of the United States and by the departure of his elder brothers Macario and Dionisio for California, in 1930 Bulosan quit his job working for his family peddling vegetables and salted fish at the local market. He was led to believe that equality existed among all classes and individuals in the United States. This American style of education highly influenced the young Bulosan as he attended high school. Also in 1901, the “Thomasites,” a group of teachers who went to the Philippines on the USS Thomas (hence the name), crossed the Pacific to educate Filipinos in the American Way. In 1903, the “Pensionado” program offered promising student scholarships to attend universities in the United States to gain knowledge that could benefit their homeland. In the period of Bulosan’s birth, Americanization of the Philippine Islands was strong. The family farm was sold, hectare by hectare, to pay for boat fare for his older brothers’ passages to the United States.
This is just one example of conflicting versions of his younger years in a peasant family with three brothers and two sisters. But other sources give Bulosan’s birth date three to four years later. He spent his last years in Seattle, jobless, penniless, and in poor health.Īccording to his baptismal records, Bulosan was born in Pangasinan Province in the Philippine Islands on November 2, 1911. He immigrated to America from the Philippines in 1930, endured horrendous conditions as a laborer, became active in the labor movement, and was blacklisted along with other labor radicals during the 1950s. Bulosan gained recognition in mainstream American society with the 1944 publication of Laughter of my Father, which was excerpted in the New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town and Country. Carlos Bulosan was a prolific writer and poet, best remembered as the author of America Is in the Heart, a landmark semi-autobiographical story about the Filipino immigrant experience.
0 kommentar(er)
