July 3, 2025: Models of Critical Patriotism: Carlos Bulosan

[As the author of a book on the contested history of American patriotism, every day of 2025 feels strikingly relevant. So for this year’s July 4^th series, I wanted to share & expand on excerpts from that book that feature models of critical patriotism from across our history, leading up to a weekend request for further conversations!]

On one of our most poetic and powerful patriotic passages.

The book excerpt: “While the Joads [in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath] experience some of the worst of the period’s oppressions and destructions, the Filipino immigrant, migrant laborer, and author Carlos Bulosan (1913–1956) experienced those and much more besides. Bulosan immigrated to the United States in 1930 at the age of 16, and for the next decade worked as a migrant laborer throughout the Western U.S., witnessing not only the economic and social hierarchies and divisions that Steinbeck depicts, but the era’s exclusionary prejudice and violence targeting Filipino Americans, including constant police brutality, outbreaks of racial terrorism such as the 1930 Watsonville, (California) massacre, and legal discriminations such as the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act and 1935 Filipino Repatriation Act. As I trace in my book We the People, those anti-Filipino exclusions were a defining element of early 20th century America, and reflect the ways in which the Depression’s myths affected immigrant and minority communities with especial force.

Bulosan documents all those exclusions and horrors in depth and with graphic detail in his first book, the autobiographical novel America is in the Heart (1946). But from its title on, that stunning work offers a critical patriotic perspective, one that refuses to turn away from all that Bulosan has experienced and witnessed yet likewise refuses to abandon his fundamental belief in America’s community and ideals. In the book’s final lines, he expresses that vision of the nation with particular clarity and power: “It was something that grew out of the sacrifices and loneliness of my friends, of my brothers in America and my family in the Philippines—something that grew out of our desire to know America, and to become a part of her great tradition, and to contribute something toward her final fulfillment. I knew that no man could destroy my faith in America that had sprung from all our hopes and aspirations, ever” (Bulosan’s emphasis). That final “our” is to my mind intentionally ambiguous, encompassing not only Bulosan’s family and cultural community, but all those Americans whose struggles and hopes constitute the idealized nation that he, like [John] Dos Passos and Steinbeck, imagines and contributes to.”

I’m not going to pretend I can follow up with anything that will be as eloquent as what Bulosan already wrote there, but I do want to add one thing to my own analysis of that beautiful closing passage. I really love that Bulosan links not only his “brothers in America” (by which he means his actual brothers, but of course also the broader Filipino American community) but also his “family in the Philippines” (by which ditto on both levels) to this process of knowing, becoming part, and contributing to America’s community, tradition, and final fulfillment. Far too often, even those of us who fully support the equal place of immigrant communities in the United States act as if it is only those folks in the U.S. who are part of that national identity. But the truth, as anyone with any experience of immigration in any way knows well, is that these families and communities and cultures maintain global connections, and thus make them part of our American story and identity as well. Making that case, as Bulosan does quickly but potently, is a profoundly critical patriotic perspective.

Last patriotic model tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Models of patriotism you’d share?