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Chapter 11
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 gets back to Binalonan, he looks for Luciano at the town hall but learns that his brother has been absent for a while. He finds Luciano at his home and learns that their parents are harvesting mongo in San Manuel. He also learns that a gambler has purchased the family’s old home. Carlos vows to return and purchase the house again, but Luciano tells him: “If I were you I would never stop moving until I came back with money.” Before he departs for Manila to go to America the next morning, Francisca gives Carlos five pesos to go to school. Carlos shares a tearful goodbye with his family, and Luciano begs him not to return to Binalonan. “Don't come back as I have done. See what happened to me?” he yells.
Here, Bulosan highlights the beauty Carlos has found within his poor family, but he also emphasizes that the same poverty that brought them together is also forcing them apart. Carlos’s vow to buy back the family home and Francisca’s gift of money to Carlos embody the warmth of the family’s love, but Luciano’s reminder that money, not love, will help the family most is a trenchant reminder that poverty is still a force that fuels despair.
Themes
On the train to Manila, Carlos notices a university student named Juan Cablaan, whose father is the governor of Pangasinan. He tells Carlos to watch out for cheating drivers and gives him new shoes to wear so he can hide his provincial origins on his way to America. Carlos arrives in Tondo, Manila’s slum district. It is rife with cockfighting, gambling, crime, and prostitution. Cablaan tells Carlos he often comes to Tondo “to see how the slum people live.” He asks Carlos if he would like to “try” a prostitute before leaving for America, but Carlos furiously runs off to his boarding house.
Although Carlos comes from a poor rural village, Bulosan’s depiction of urban poverty in the novel is quite different from the rural poverty of his birth. Whereas near-starvation and backbreaking labor are the hallmarks of a rural peasant’s existence, vice and crime are the defining elements of poverty in cities. The apparent thrill Cablaan gets from watching people in the slums adds a level of surreal exoticism to Bulosan’s depiction of urban poverty.
Themes
In the morning, Carlos travels by truck to the government detention center, where a doctor examines him before he boards the boat bound for America. The boat moves slowly from the harbor under a shower of confetti from onlookers. “I knew that I was going away from everything I had loved and known,” he write. After the boat departs, he goes down to the filthy steerage hold below.
Carlos’s move to America represents both an opportunity and a tragedy. He loves his family dearly, but knows that if he is ever to help them, as well as himself, he must leave them, with the knowledge that he may never get the chance to see them again.
Themes
