Carlos Bulosan

Carlos Bulosan was a Filipino American migrant worker, labor activist, and writer, best known for his semi-autobiographical novel, America Is in the Heart (1946), which chronicled the struggles of Depression-era low-wage Filipino workers in the United States. Bulosan’s writing served to galvanize those workers, as well as the Filipino community more broadly, to organize to fight against exploitation.

Bulosan immigrated to America from the Philippines in 1930, and endured horrendous conditions as a laborer on farms in Washington and California. In this period, he became active in the labor movement as an organizer, writer, and editor. After being hospitalized for tuberculosis in 1938, Bulosan began writing for a wider audience. One of his most famous essays, published in March 1943, was chosen by The Saturday Evening Post to accompany its publication of the Norman Rockwell painting Freedom from Want. He gained wider recognition in mainstream American society with the 1944 publication of Laughter of My Father, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town and Country. He continued to be active in the labor movement along the Pacific coast in the 1950s and edited the 1952 Yearbook of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 37, a predominantly Filipino American cannery workers union based in Seattle. However, this activism brought him to the attention of the FBI, and he was blacklisted along with other labor radicals during the Red Scare of the 1950s. He authored multiple plays, short stories, poems, and novels, including The Cry and the Dedication (1995), which was published posthumously.

Image of Bulosan from Bulosan.org, an online exhibit created to honor the centennial of his birth and recognize his impact.