Pinas Forum

Tata · Member

Excerpts of Carlos Bulosan's Works

Tata · Member

[A poignant scene as described by a fifteen-year old farm boy upon returning home to his family's remaining strip of land, having left home earlier at the age of thirteen to escape the bitter memories of an impoverished childhood.]

"Then I saw my mother's familiar back. She was following the plow, her skirt tucked between her legs. Suddenly I knew what Leon had felt that day he came home, running suddenly to take the plow from my father. I started running across the fields and leaping over ditches, shouting and calling frantically: "Mother! Mother! Mother!"

My mother stopped the carabao and looked toward me. The sun was falling directly upon her face, and she raised her hand to protect her eyes from the strong morning light. When she recognized me, she tied the rope to the handle of the plow, as my father used to do, and waited for me.

"Have you come home, son?" she said. And that was all she could say. Her mouth began to tremble with joy and sorrow were always one and the same. Suddenly, she grabbed me affectionately and wept, murmuring: "We are poor people, son. We are poor people, son."

I brushed back the tears from my eyes. I tried to laugh in order not to cry. Gently I pushed my mother out of the way and took the rope from her.

"Go home, Mother," I said. "I will finish this piece for you." "Don't work the animal too hard," she said.

"I won't," I said. I watched her go away, a little peasant woman who carried the world on her shoulders. Then I flipped the rope gently across the carabao's back and the animal moved obediently and expertly along the deep furrows."

-- Edited by Tata at 01:25, 2008-07-22

Tata · Member

I found the dark hole of the steerage and lay on my bunk for days without food, seasick and lonely. I was restless at night and many disturbing thoughts came to my mind. Why had I left home? What would I do in America? I looked into the faces of my companions for a comforting answer, but they were as young and bewildered as I, and my only consolation was their proximity and the familiarity of their dialects. It was not until we had left Japan that I began to feel better.

One day in mid-ocean, I climbed through the narrow passageway to the deck where other steerage passengers were sunning themselves. Most of them were Ilocanos, who were fishermen in the northern coastal regions of Luzon. They were talking easily and eating rice with salted fish with their bare hands, and some of them were walking, barefoot and unconcerned, in their homemade cotton shorts. The first-class passengers were annoyed, and an official of the boat came down and drove us back into the dark haven below. The small opening at the top of the iron ladder was shut tight, and we did not see the sun again until we had passed Hawaii.

Tata · Member

The man said something, but they had already turned and the wind carried it away. I was to hear that girls voice in many ways afterward in the United States. It became no longer her voice, but an angry chorus shouting:

Why dont they ship those monkeys back where they came from?

Tata · Member

We arrived in Seattle on a June day. My first sight of the approaching land was an exhilarating experience. Everything seemed native and promising to me. It was like coming home after a long voyage, although as yet I had no home in this city. Everything seemed familiar and kind - the white faces of the buildings melting in the soft afternoon sun, the gray contours of the surrounding valleys that seemed to vanish in the last periphery of light. With a sudden surge of joy, I knew that I must find a home in this new land.

I had only twenty cents left, not even enough to take me to Chinatown where, I had been informed, a Filipino hotel and two restaurants were located. Fortunately two oldtimers put me in a car with four others, and took us to a hotel on King Street, the heart of Filipino life in Seattle. Marcelo, who was also in the car, had a cousin named Elias who came to our room with another oldtimer. Elias and his unknown friend persuaded my companions to play a strange kind of card game. In a little while Elias got up and touched his friend suggestively; then they disappeared and we never saw them again.

Tata · Member

It is but fair to say that America is not a land of one race or one class of men. We are all Americans that have toiled and suffered and known oppression and defeat, from the first Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to the last Filipino pea picker.

America is not bound by geographical latitudes. America is not merely a land or an institution. America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom: it is also in the eyes of men that are building a new world. America is a prophecy of a new society of men: of a system that knows no sorrow or strife or suffering. America is a warning to those who would try to falsify the ideals of freemen.

America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the black body dangling on a tree .America is the illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual opportunities is closed to him.

We are all that nameless foreigner, that homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that illiterate immigrant and that lynched black body. All of us, from the first Adam to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate We are America!

tala · Member

The Romance of Magno Rubio

A Filipino boy. Four-foot six inches tall. Dark as a coconut. Head small on a body like a turtle's. Magno is in love with a girl he has never seen except for a blurry photo in the Lonely Hearts section of a magazine. Clarabelle, the object of his love, is a young woman living in Arkansas, nearly six feet tall and weighing almost 200 pounds, "a girl twice his size sideward and upward.

Notes on The Romance of Magno Rubio

banana · Member

Magno and his bunkmates were part of the first wave of manongs who went to Hawaii and Alaska and California-100,000 strong--in the early 1900s believing, as they had been told in school, that all men were created equal and that they were the cherished little brown brothers spoken of by the American Colonial powers in the Philippines. They were not. On the contrary, they were subject to Asian Exclusion Acts and were prevented from buying land, owning a business or a house, and were often the victims of beatings and even lynchings. In many states, Filipino men were not even allowed to marry Caucasian women.

So, there they were, in America, not much better off in any way than they had been before. At least back home they could have a wife and children. Have one place to live that is home and not have to wander the earth alone.

The bunkhouse would have to be their home. If it was not the bunkhouse, the servants' quarters; if not the servants' quarters, it was the tiny rooms in boarding houses or residential hotels in the worst part of town where they did not have signs up saying "No Filipinos or Dogs Allowed."

Businesses from Hawaii to Alaska to California lured young Filipino men to America with big promises and big ad campaigns that probably cost more than all the money these thousands of men, collectively, earned in a year. In California, the "boys" worked in the fields, picking strawberries or lettuce with short handled hoes that did not allow you to sit or stand. They worked even when the temperatures hit 115 and even when the crop dusters swooped down over the fields to spray insecticides.

Magno Rubio almost fits the racist caricatures drawn in those times of the Filipino savages so feared and despised in the country they had been taught to believe would welcome them with open arms.

The manongs were a vein of gold, working as the very cheapest labor in the plantations of Hawaii, the fish canneries of Alaska and the Northwest, and like Claro, Nick, and Magno, in the fields of California.

Magno's America was Clarabelle. Of course Clarabelle was a dream that could not come true, anymore than the dream of prosperity (or even solvency) could come true for the manongs. They went from job to job, room to room, state to state, searching for the America they struggled to believe was somewhere to be found.

Carlos Bulosan said that he could love America even though it did not love him. Yet, in the last line of the story, he poses a question that reveals his continuing struggle to admire and believe in what is good in the beloved without also feeling some despair over the many things that are not. He asks, simply, "Why does everybody make it difficult for an honest man like Magno Rubio to live in the world?"

banana · Member

banana wrote:
They were... often the victims of beatings and even lynchings. In many states, Filipino men were not even allowed to marry Caucasian women.

What differentiates Asian and non-Asian immigration to the United States is the sticking point of race. In the case of the Filipino American experience, there was another additional characteristic. The Filipino was seen as a sexual threat. Not a trivial distinction, this label has been cause of much pain and violence.

The early Filipino migrant, not unlike his cohorts from other Asian countries came to the United States alone. Without the time consuming task of raising children and the companionship of a wife, the lone Filipino sought diversion and distraction in more readily available spaces (Silk Screen: A Dollar A Day, 10 Cents a Dance). It is in those spaces that the Filipino encountered some of the most virulent forms of racism. He was seen as a threat. Takaki outlines the conditions, the sources, and consequences of the anti-miscegenation phenomenon in Strangers from a Different Shore.

The extreme violence of the anti-Filipino fury betrayed fears of Filipino sexuality. The Japs and Chinese have never mixed with white women to any extent, not to the extent that the Filipino does anyway. Unlike men from China, Japan, Korea, and India, men from the Philippines seemed to seek out white female companionship and to be attractive to white women.

The Filipinos are a social menace as they will not leave our white girls alone and frequently intermarry, said a white man before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in 1930. [] Explaining the Filipinos success with white women, the deputy labor commissioner said: The love-making of the Filipino is primitive, even heathenish more elaborate. A California businessman put it more bluntly: The Filipinos are hot little rabbits and many of these white women like them for this reason (Takaki, Strangers 328).

According to Espiritu, in Watsonville, California, four hundred white vigilantes attacked a Filipino dance club, beating dozens of Filipinos and killing one (Espiritu, Filipino 13). Simultaneously, race riots occurred in California and Washington. California and 12 other states enacted miscegenation laws banning marriages between Filipinos (then called Malays) and whites (Ancheta 82-103).

-- Edited by banana at 23:44, 2008-07-23