[For my Patriots’ Day series this year, I highlighted examples of mythic patriotism from across American history. So I thought for my July 4th series I would AmericanStudy examples of the other, directly opposed category at the heart of Of Thee I Sing: critical patriotism. Leading up to a weekend post on the state of critical patriotism in 2024!]
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.
Last model
of critical patriotism tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other examples or forms of patriotism you’d highlight?
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