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![]() This, too, is an immigrant story.Īs a writer and as someone who also comes from a country where the U.S. He died of exposure on the steps of Seattle City Hall in 1956, his literary reputation already fading. The FBI investigated him for being a communist labor activist, and he was afflicted with alcoholism and tuberculosis. In his essay, he wrote about how “the American Dream is only hidden away, and it will push its way up and grow again.” But his life ended in the American nightmare. Bulosan’s writing and life revealed that contradiction. The book, like his essay, explored how his adopted nation sometimes welcomed immigrants and sometimes hated them. ![]() ![]() ![]() His career peaked with his 1946 classic, America Is in the Heart. Being a colonized American ward was how Bulosan found his way to this country and became a celebrated writer. Because they were governed by the U.S., Filipinos could circumvent the exclusion laws that had almost completely eliminated Asian immigration from 1882 until the 1950s. Colonizing the Philippines resulted in an odd quirk of immigration. ![]() Instead of giving the Philippines its freedom, America decided to rule it, waging a war and killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in the process. “Even when we see our children suffer humiliations, we cannot believe that America has no more place for us.” Bulosan was from the Philippines, which the U.S. “Sometimes we ask if this is the real America,” the immigrant writer Carlos Bulosan wrote in “Freedom From Want,” a 1943 essay for the Saturday Evening Post. ![]()
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