[In honor of Patriots’ Day,
and inspired by my book-in-progress for the American Ways
series on the history of American patriotisms, a series on that topic and brief
examples of critical patriotism from across American history. Leading up to a
special post on that next book project of mine!]
On an author and book that both introduce under-narrated histories and
redefine American identity.
One of my
bigger pet peeves with the dominant narratives of American history is the
notion that multi-national and –ethnic immigration has been a relatively recent
phenomenon, or at least that it has been most pronounced in the last few
decades. It’s true that the
1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the first immigration law that opened
up rather than closed down immigration for various groups and nationalities,
led directly to certain significant waves, especially those from war-torn
Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. And it is also
true that certain ethnic groups represented particularly sizeable percentages
of the immigrants in the last decades of the 20th century: Asian
Americans, again, and also Hispanic and West Indian immigrants. None of those
facts are insignificant, and our understanding of America in the 1970s and 80s
(for example) needs to include them in a prominent place. But my issue is with
the very different notion that America prior to 1965 didn’t include immigrants
from these nations (an idea advanced in its most overt form, for example, by Pat
Buchanan in an editorial after the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007, which he
blamed on the shooter’s status as the son of South Korean immigrants).
Multicultural historian Ronald
Takaki notes this belief in the introduction to his
magisterial book A Different Mirror (1993),
recounting a conversation when a cab-driver asks him how long he has been in
the US, and he has to reply that his family has been here for over 100 years.
While the most obvious and widespread problem with this belief is that it makes
it much easier to define members of these groups as less American than others,
I would argue that another very significant downside is that it enables us to
more easily forget or ignore the stories of earlier such immigrants; that group
would include Yung
Wing, Maria
Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Sui
Sin Far, and my focus for today, the Filipino-American migrant
worker, novelist, poet, and labor activist Carlos Bulosan. Bulosan came to
the United States in 1930 at the age of 17 (or so, his birthdate is a bit
fuzzy), and only lived another 26 years, but in that time he worked literally
hundreds of different jobs up and down the West Coast, agitated on behalf of
migrant and impoverished laborers and citizens during and after the Depression,
published various poems and short stories (and wrote many others that remained
unpublished upon his far too early death), and wrote the autobiographical,
complex, deeply moving, and critically patriotic novel America
is in the Heart (1946).
For the most
part the book—which is certainly very autobiographical but apparently includes
many fictionalized characters, hence the designation of it as a novel (in the
vein of something like On the Road or
The
Bell-Jar)—paints an incredibly bleak picture of its multiple,
interconnected worlds: of migrant laborers; of the lower and working classes in
the Depression; and of Filipino-American immigrants. In the first two focal
points, and especially in its tone, which mixes bleak psychological realism
with strident social criticism, Bulosan’s book certainly echoes (or at least
parallels, since it is difficult to know if Bulosan had read the earlier work)
and importantly complements The Grapes of Wrath.
But despite that tone, Heart’s
ultimate trajectory (like that of Steinbeck’s novel, which is why I paired them
in a chapter in my
fourth book) is surprisingly and powerfully hopeful. That’s true partly
because of the opening chapters, which are set in Bulosan’s native Philippines
and make it much more difficult to see the book’s America as an entirely bleak
place; but mostly because of the evocative concluding chapter, where Bulosan
develops at length his title’s argument for the continuing and defining
existence of a more ideal America, in the very hearts of all those seemingly
least advantaged Americans on whom his book has focused. The idea might sound
clichéd, but all I can say is “Read the book”; it works, and works beautifully,
as a unique and potent literary model of critical patriotism.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other examples or forms of patriotism you’d highlight?
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