Carlos Bulosan in a Time of the Wars on Terror

Abstract

Bulosan has also been co-opted and taken for granted. Since the sixties, when Filipinos struggling for civil rights and against the Vietnam War discovered Bulosan, the author of America Is in the Heart has become institutionalized as a harmless ethnic icon. Notwithstanding this, I have met Filipino college students today who have no idea who Bulosan is and don't care. Obviously, times have changed; indeed, circumstances, not ideas, largely determine attitudes, choices, inclinations. The current war on what Washington and the Pentagon regard as foes of democracy and freedom, just like the war against Japanese militarism in World War II that compelled Filipino migrant workers to join the U.S. military, is already repeating that call for unity with the neocolonial masters, for suspending antagonisms, rendering Bulosan's cry for equality and justice superfluous.