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Chapter 15
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
Carlos is alone on another freight train and travels south until he reaches San Luis Obispo. There, he gets a ride from a fellow Filipino named Doro, who drives him to another town. Doro explains how white people view all Filipinos as pimps and criminals. This is the first moment when Carlos begins to truly understand that it is “a crime to be a Filipino in California.” By criminalizing an entire group of people, American society has driven Filipinos like Doro inward, making them “[hate] everyone and [despise] all positive urgencies towards freedom.”
This is a key moment in Carlos’s intellectual development, as he sees how racism becomes a corrosive element in Filipino people that causes them to nurture a destructive self-hatred. American racism is tragic for a number of reasons, but in large part because it makes an entire group of human beings into criminals merely for existing in a place where the majority white population does not want them to exist. In turn, Bulosan notes, many Filipinos internalize this hatred with destructive results.
Themes
They arrive at the town of Lompoc, where Carlos goes into a Mexican café and meets a cigar-smoking Filipino who is sitting alone in a corner. The man leads Carlos to another café, where he is ambushed by a knife-wielding assailant who turns out to be Carlos’s brother, Amado.
Carlos’s violent first meeting with Amado foreshadows the tumultuous relationship the brothers will have from this point on. As this encounter immediately makes clear, America has changed Amado for the worse.
Themes
At first, Amado does not recognize Carlos. But the brothers soon reconnect, and Carlos learns that the name of the man he followed is Alfredo. Carlos tells Amado about his experiences in America thus far, and Carlos is shocked to learn that while Amado is articulate and speaks perfect English, he has become a bootlegger of alcohol in order to weather the Great Depression. Amado takes Carlos on a run to pick up illegal alcohol, and Amado’s careless lust for money disappoints Carlos. As Amado bids him farewell, Carlos hopes that America will not change him the way it did his brother.
Carlos views Amado’s transition into a criminal as a tragic development. Nonetheless, the trials of living as a Filipino in America have helped Amado to become an articulate English speaker, much to Carlos’s surprise. Amado’s fall from grace in Carlos’s eyes comes, somewhat paradoxically, at the same moment that Carlos sees how Amado has been able to further his own education. As before, happy outcomes coexist with unhappy ones.
Themes
