Gone are Bulosan’s pea pickers, drifters and gamblers, hopping freight trains up and down the coast. A portrait of Filipinos in 1990s California, it’s hungrily ambitious in sweep and documentary in detail, and reads like a seismograph of the aftershocks from trading one life for another. The book - lean as a liturgy, with jags into the sublime - bears witness to the wrongs visited upon them by white Americans who called them “monkeys,” barred them from restaurants, refused to rent rooms to them, assaulted them for befriending white women and sometimes shot them in the back out of sheer boredom.Įlaine Castillo’s debut novel, “America Is Not the Heart,” with its echoing title, draws a clear line of descent from Bulosan’s testament. “It was a crime to be a Filipino in California,” the poet and labor organizer Carlos Bulosan wrote in his 1943 half-novel, half-memoir, “America Is in the Heart.” The son of subsistence farmers, he came from what was then the American territory of the Philippines to the United States during the Great Depression along with some 100,000 migrant workers, almost all men, almost all poor and desperate. AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART By Elaine Castillo 480 pp.
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