Carlos Bulosan (1913–1956)

I read this novel for a Postcolonial literature class at CU Boulder.

I give it three stars only because it is so raw and honest. The perspective Bulosan offers is an important part of our collective history and he has captured the darkest corners of it.

As for the writing, while beautiful at times, the novel was very hard to follow. I eventually realized that, to continue reading, I would just have to stop caring about one big story and start enjoying the little stories as they came at me.

I never did get all the characters straight. Absolutely loved part one but after that, the writing is a mess that becomes harder to follow the deeper you get into the book.

Won't read it again. But won't forget it.… (mais)

The figure of Carlos Bulosan cuts a distinct outline in the history of Philippine-American relations. His account of the exploitation and violence perpetrated upon Filipino farm workers in the United States during the Great Depression, through the War and until the early 1950s when McCarthyist hysteria started gripping the minds of the mainstream American population, provides an incalculable source of a viewpoint that is not much read in mainstream historical works even today. Reading Bulosan is reading not only the biography of a single Filipino coming to grips with a new world of exploitation, it is the history of the whole uprooted Filipino workers who sought to understand the America that was idealized and the America that was reality. This paper aims to highlight the contradictions in the conception of America in the writings of Bulosan as we will find that the praises he often sings for America, is for an abstract America that is an almost utopian ideal divorced from reality. The paper will attempt to present this seeming contradiction by looking at the works written by Bulosan, works written about Bulosan and of the Asian immigrant in general, and lastly will draw on the author's own interpretation of Bulosan as an artist.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/52901549/America-as-Paradox-Philippine-American-Relati...… (mais)