America Is in the Heart: Chapter 19 Summary & Analysis

Carlos describes the discrimination Filipinos experience during the “year of the great hatred.” When a Filipino in Pasadena marries a white girl, they are brought to court in the case of Roldan v. The United States. The case challenges the law that Filipinos are not “Mongolians” and are therefore exempt from laws forbidding marriages between whites and Mongolians. Amidst such racial fervor, José and Carlos arrive in San Diego, where the latter is beaten several times by hotel and restaurant owners. He and José take a train south to the town of Holtville, where they learn that a Filipino labor organizer “had been found dead in a ditch.” In another instance, a restaurant owner and several other white men nearly beat a Filipino man to death for bringing his wife (who is white) and their mixed-race child into the restaurant. 

While sneaking through a pea field, Carlos and José come across a jalopy driven by a man named Frank, who gives them a ride to Bakersfield. They find work on a large farm, but soon a Filipino labor camp at a neighboring farm goes up in flames. “I understood it to be a racial issue,” Carlos notes, “because everywhere I went I saw white men attacking Filipinos.” The men flee to the freight yards, but the boxcars are all loaded. Detectives arrive to prevent the Filipinos from riding the train. José attempts to avoid the detectives but gets caught under the train, and both of his feet are severed from his body.

Carlos and Frank rescue José and try to hail a car, but the motorists spurn their cries for help. Eventually, an old man drives them to the hospital, where José receives care. Carlos marvels at this paradox in American culture: drivers on the highway spit at the Filipinos, yet white people in the hospital give them loving care. “Why was America so kind and yet so cruel?” Carlos wonders. While José stays in the hospital, Frank and Carlos take a train east to Idaho, where they work several weeks picking peas. Frank soon tires of pea-picking and takes a bus to Chicago, and Carlos travels to Montana. There, he works in a Filipino labor camp lead by a man named Pete. 

Pete’s wife, Myra, is having an affair with another worker, Poco. One night, Pete beats Myra over the affair and attempts to kill her with a knife. Carlos intervenes, but he is knocked out by Poco’s cousin, Alfred. When the violence subsides, Pete and Myra reconcile, but when Poco arrives and vows to kill Pete, Alfred and Carlos ride away in a truck. They are heading back west, “back to the beginning of [Carlos’s] life in America,” where Carlos is “going back to start all over again.”