Poverty Theme Analysis

America is in the Heart contains many antagonists, particularly the numerous white people who cheat and abuse Carlos throughout his life in America. However, poverty—the state of being too poor to afford the necessities to live a thriving life—is the greatest overall antagonist in Bulosan’s story. From the time he is born, poverty defines Carlos’s life, and he is never able to completely escape poverty’s psychological influence. Poverty is the book’s ultimate antagonist because it is the single biggest obstacle to human flourishing in both the Philippines and in the U.S. Those who cannot afford food, water, shelter, medicine, and education not only struggle to survive daily, they also have few options to improve their lives in the future. Poverty, therefore, is not just a state but also a cycle. Carlos and his family’s ongoing struggle not only as poor peasants in the Philippines, but as American immigrants, demonstrates that the cycle of poverty reproduces itself through generations and fuels the numerous injustices that Carlos and other poor people experience.

Carlos realizes very early in his life that poverty is a curse into which he is born, and that he and others like him will spend much of their lives struggling to break free from this curse. The Bulosan family’s poverty results in father losing his land to a distant plantation owner. The futile struggle to reclaim the land leaves him “fighting to the end and dying on it like a peasant.” Carlos becomes “sensitive in the presence of poverty and degradation,” and notes that his experience with poverty “tempered my psychological relation to the world.” Because he is born into poverty, poverty will always shape how he sees the world around him.

Not only is poverty a fact of Carlos’s life, he sees it getting worse with the growing power of plantations, banks, and the church. “As bloodily as this wealth concentrated into the hands of the new companies,” he writes, “as swiftly did the peasants and workers become poorer.” The growing industrial economy shows Carlos that poverty results from an imbalance of wealth between a small group of ruling elites and the vast majority of people whom the elites keep in poverty. After witnessing a failed peasant revolt, Carlos vows to escape the “circumscribed” peasant life with its “crushing forces.” He also wishes, however, “to understand what it meant to be born of the peasantry.” Realizing that poverty is a part of his identity, “no matter where I went or what became of me,” Carlos is determined to learn what causes poverty and how people can overcome it.

The transition from the Philippines to America removes Carlos from the poverty of the rural peasantry but thrusts him into the poverty of an itinerant wage laborer, and he witnesses other minorities living a degraded life in the so-called “land of opportunity.” Forced into menial jobs that leave him scraping by in a constant state of hunger and fear, he moves from place to place, losing friends along the way. “Some survived death but could not survive life,” he writes, “could I forget all the horror and pain? Could I survive life?” This sentiment, that life is something to “survive” rather than “live,” attests to the firm hold that poverty has on his existence. Carlos is not alone in his experience with American poverty. In one instance, he sees a starving Mexican child become addicted to wine, which “gave him release, and soothed his hunger.” Carlos sees himself in the child: “I knew that he would grow up to destroy this planless life around him, or it would destroy him,” he writes. People cannot choose poverty; rather, poverty chooses them. Nor does poverty simply go away on its own when poor people immigrate to a new country—rather, it is a cycle that follows people wherever they go, and they must work tirelessly to overcome its effects.

Even more degrading than the living conditions of Carlos and other poor immigrants is the fact that the wealthy wield poverty as a weapon to control others. The bosses who pay farm workers slave wages, the police who criminalize being Filipino, and the gamblers and pimps who prey on the despair of the poor all rely on poverty as the source of their power. The socioeconomic power of white America “worked as one group to deprive Filipinos of the right to live as free men in a country founded upon this very principle.” This realization, that to challenge poverty one must challenge those in power, leads Carlos into the labor and socialist movements. The organized labor movement provides Carlos with an ideological framework for understanding and resisting poverty in the lives of Filipinos and other minority groups in America. The harsh racism he experiences in America initially drives Carlos into a tribal relationship with other Filipinos that “hated the broad white universe.” Socialism, however, offers him a different way of looking at the world. “Socialism was destroying my chauvinism,” he writes, as it opens his mind to the possibility of unity for the betterment of all. In the union movement, Carlos discovers that a shared interest in resisting the powerful forces that keep minority groups in poverty is “the one and only common thread that bound us together, white and black and brown, in America.” Bulosan finds agency in understanding that poverty is not something that just happens, but is instead the result of human behavior, and he can therefore fight this behavior. The Filipino Worker’s Association (FWA) and the Committee for Protection of Filipino Rights (CPFR) become vehicles for Filipinos to voice their grievances against employers and the state (poor wages, terrible conditions, discrimination in housing, etc.). While both organizations struggle to survive, they do provide a template not only for overcoming poverty, but also for attacking its source.

Poverty is the central antagonist of America is in the Heart because it defines Carlos Bulosan’s life from birth. His struggle to overcome the psychological effects of poverty leads him to better understand how society is organized around him, and it offers him an avenue for challenging the systems of injustice that prevent America from achieving its stated goal of equality and opportunity for all people.