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Chapter 2
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
The end of Macario’s school year approaches, and Carlos’s family hopes he can help buy back their land from the moneylender. To celebrate a national election, Father tells Carlos to bring a white goat from the pasture to slaughter. Carlos and Father also fill a sack with tomatoes and eggplants and gather snails from a pond. Carlos hopes that Macario “will bring some books with him" upon his return home.
Once again, Bulosan contrasts older peasant traditions with new developments in Filipino society. Here, Carlos’s family follows up voting in an American-style modern election with a traditional slaughter of a goat, showing how new and old can blend in societies like this one.
Themes
Binalonan’s streets are filled with peasants casting their ballots, and Mother is selling salted fish and vegetables in the public market. As Father and Carlos wait in the plaza, they see Macario arrive from a bus. He is dressed in a new white cotton suit but still resembles his father. Macario embraces Carlos and Father and tells Carlos that he must cut his long hair so as to look like a “gentleman.”
Macario’s arrival home following his graduation from high school highlights the way Bulosan contrasts the new with old. Not only does the younger Macario contrast with his older father, but also his modern clothing symbolizes the new world he now inhabits. Macario’s middle-class existence is a stark contrast to the peasant existence of his birth.
Themes
Carlos walks silently through the plaza between Macario and Father, and the latter two act as “strong walls” who guide Carlos “into the future that [is] waiting with all its ferocity.” When they arrive at the family house, Father slaughters the goat and Carlos lays down a bowl to collect the blood. After a dinner of the goat and some vegetables, the family discusses Macario’s schooling. He tells them that in three months he will be finished, but he needs 200 pesos to finish his last course.
The symbolism of Carlos walking between Macario and Father is striking. It suggests how Carlos is now caught between Macario’s modern world, with its promises of education and escape from poverty, and the traditional peasant lifestyle represented by Father, whom Carlos deeply loves. Together, the “strong walls” of Macario and Father support Carlos in different ways over the course of his life, even though they also represent the conflicting worlds he inhabits.
Themes
Mother tells Macario that the family has no money left. Father says he will sell the remaining land, and the prospect terrifies Mother. The family now has only the church’s land to raise crops, a third of which must go to the church. Carlos explains that the combination of absentee landlords, large corporations, and a corrupt church have been detrimental to the Philippine peasantry.
Vast social changes are upending the lives of Filipino peasants, and these changes will soon force Bulosan’s close-knit family to separate, despite their deep love for each other. Throughout the novel, Carlos must deal with larger forces that are beyond his immediate control, and coping with such developments contributes to his intellectual development over time.
Themes
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Despite his dire economic circumstances, Father maintains hope, a basic faith in humanity, and an “instinct for the truth.” Carlos says that the latter is an “inborn quality” that is “common among peasants.” That summer, peasants in a southern province revolt against the exploitative absentee landlords who keep the peasantry in a state of poverty. Although the authorities violently suppress the revolt, such “sporadic revolts and uprisings” expose the “malignant cancer that [is] eating away the nation's future security.” Carlos notes that this negative force is turning the Philippines into a “gigantic agricultural country” where corporations, banks, the church, and a native professional class of lawyers exploit the majority rural peasantry. Carlos explains that these intolerable conditions could not last forever, especially when peasant sons went to school and learned about justice and social equality.
Despite the vastly different paths the two men take in life, Father’s faith in the inherent goodness of humanity provides Carlos with an intellectual template that he uses to endure the struggles that come to define his life. When the racism and violence Carlos experiences in America later threaten to erode his optimistic view of the world, his ability to see the goodness in people connects him directly to Father’s hopeful lineage. Bulosan mentions the hope embodied by his father alongside rising peasant revolts to foreshadow how hope will serve as a constant buffer for Carlos during trying times.
Themes
Amidst these conditions, Macario graduates from high school and begins teaching in Binalonan, where he earns a salary of fifty pesos a month. The extra money eases Father’s worries, and he takes Carlos on a hunting trip. They gather shrimp from a pool, place them inside bamboo shoots, and cook them in banana leaves over a fire. The shrimp proves far tastier than the wild boar they kill on the hunt. Carlos also catches a little deer and brings it home with him, but it turns out to be difficult to domesticate.
This section contrasts with Bulosan’s earlier mention of how poverty has sapped any leisure time from his family’s life. Aided by the cushion of Macario’s new wage, Carlos and Father are able to enjoy a day hunting together. Alleviating poverty, this episde shows, makes life more enjoyable.
Themes
A few weeks after the hunting trip, a man presents Father with a letter purported to be from the church. Unable to read the letter, Father brings it to town for Macario to read. The next morning, Carlos and Father take a pre-dawn walk, during which Father reveals that the church land now belongs to “a rich man in Manila.”
The fact that a wealthy landowner in far-off Manila can have such control over Carlos’s family is emblematic of the reach and influence that the powerful have in the lives of the powerless.
Themes
Father’s loss of the church land to an absentee landlord in Manila marks the beginning of his futile struggle to hold onto his land. In a further desperate attempt, Father walks to Lingayen to fight for control of the land. He walks back on bloodied feet, a “defeated man.”
Father’s descent into despair suggests that hope alone is not enough to fight injustice in the world. Carlos learns here that unless hope is paired with action, it cannot address the despair that dominates so many people’s lives.
Themes
