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Chapter 9
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
When Carlos returns to his family back home during New Year’s celebrations, Luciano finds him and reveals that Father has sold their house and bought a small plot of land in Mangusmana. Due to Father’s ill health, Mother is doing most of the farm work.
The hope that America represents contrasts starkly with the fortunes of Carlos’s family, who continue to struggle in the wake of Father’s loss of the land.
Themes
Carlos soon finds Mother, “a little peasant woman who carried the world on her shoulders,” plowing the new land and offers to finish the job for her. In the house, Father lies shivering and coughing. Carlos meets up with his cousin, who takes him dancing in a nearby village. They dance with several “shy peasant girls” and Carlos finds release in the activity. “When you dance for the first time, the world is like a cradle upon the biggest ocean in the universe,” he notes, but when the song is over, “You are pushed back to reality, to the world of puny men and women who are circumscribed by fear.” The next morning, Carlos and his cousin flee the peasant girls who now want to marry them, and they eventually go to Lingayen.
Carlos’s experiences with Filipino women are quite different from his experiences with American women. Here and several other times throughout, Filipino women in Bulosan’s novel threaten to trap Carlos into a traditional Filipino peasant’s life, from which he yearns to escape. By contrast, American women support Carlos by nurturing both his body and his mind, thereby allowing him to fulfill his dreams of literary success in America.
Themes
