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Chapter 4
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
Working with Mother helps Carlos understand the obsession with food that drives the peasants’ lives, an obsession he will relate to throughout his life. “Many of the peasants were starving, but like my family they were full of pride,” he states. He and Mother begin selling beans in the town of Puzzorobio, which means crossing more dangerous rivers. In Puzzorobio, many rich people frequent the market, and Mother admires the rich women’s “delicately embroidered dresses” and “silk handkerchiefs.”
The constant lack of food brings a debilitating hunger that plagues Carlos throughout his life. Here, he witnesses the hunger of the peasantry, which Bulosan contrasts with the fineries that the wealthy market visitors display. The fact that great wealth and great poverty often exist literally side by side is a thread that runs throughout Bulosan’s novel.
Themes
One day, a rich young girl comes to the market with her two servants. The traders of rice and beans tremble with “envy and admiration” for her. When the rich girl sees Mother selling beans, she mocks her as a “poor woman” and knocks over her basket of beans. In response, Mother merely insists that “it is all right.” Carlos is disgusted by the middle class’s “contempt for the peasantry.”
Not only does poverty bring constant humiliation, it also it leaves the poor unable to protest their unfair treatment. Mother endures the rich girl’s insults because she has no other choice, and her helplessness in the face of such degradation contributes to Carlos’s lifelong contempt for the ruling classes.
Themes
Mother and Carlos’s trips to Puzzorobio are largely successful until one day while crossing the river, Mother slips and loses a basket of beans in the water. The accident ends their trips to Puzzorobio. Meanwhile, Father takes back the farm but must still make payments. Mother and Carlos start harvesting mongoes, or yellow beans, in San Manuel to sell in the town’s public market. There, they encounter many Igorots who come from the mountains to trade with the lowlanders. Mother buys a small piece of cotton cloth for Irene and they return to Binalonan. She also tells Carlos that he can now attend school. The thought of school enchants Carlos with dreams of becoming a doctor. At home, Irene is sick and begins screaming and bleeding from the nose.
Hope often exists alongside tragedy in Carlos’s young life. Just as he and Mother experience success trading in the villages, the dangers of river crossing force them stop trading. Similarly, Father briefly regains a measure of control over the farm, but he must still find money to pay the moneylender. Moreover, when Mother purchases a pretty cloth for Irene, the latter becomes gravely ill. For Carlos, his excitement over starting school immediately precedes a series of impending family tragedies, again showing how hope and desolation often exist side by side.
Themes
