America Is in the Heart
About this audiobook
A 1946 Filipino American social classic about the United States in the 1930s from the perspective of a Filipino migrant laborer who endures racial violence and struggles with the paradox of the American dream, with a foreword by novelist Elaine Castillo
Poet, essayist, novelist, fiction writer, and labor organizer, Carlos Bulosan (1911–1956) wrote one of the most influential working class literary classics about the US pre–World War II, a period and setting similar to that of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row. Bulosan’s semiautobiographical novel America Is in the Heart begins with the narrator’s rural childhood in the Philippines and the struggles of land-poor peasant families affected by US imperialism after the Spanish American War of the late 1890s.
Carlos’s experiences with other Filipino migrant laborers, who endured intense racial abuse in the fields, orchards, towns, cities, and canneries of California and the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s, reexamine the ideals of the American dream. Bulosan was one of the most important twentieth-century social critics with his deeply moving account of what it was like to be criminalized in the US as a Filipino migrant drawn to the ideals of what America symbolized and committed to social justice for all marginalized groups.
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About the author
Carlos Bulosan (1911–1956) arrived in the United States at the start of the Great Depression as part of a generation of Filipino migrant workers. From 1930 to 1956, Bulosan developed into a leading Filipino writer in the United States committed to social justice. A pioneering Filipino writer-activist in the United States, Bulosan is an iconic figure of Filipino American literature and Filipino American labor history.
ELAINE CASTILLO was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and now lives in southeast London. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and received her MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she was shortlisted for the Pat Kavanagh Award. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Gatewood Prize semi-finalist, and three-time winner of the Roselyn Schneider Eisner Prize for prose. America Isn't the Heart is her first novel.
Ramón de Ocampo, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, was a cowinner in 2018 of the Audie Award for Best Multi-Voiced Performance. A graduate of the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, he has been seen on television, film, and stages all over the world, including recurring roles on such television shows as The West Wing, 12 Monkeys, Sons of Anarchy, and Medium. He is the winner of a prestigious Obie Award for his stage work.
