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.The Commonweal wrote: The roots of [the narrator s] life are in the hills ofhome; and the land, adding that their father loved his land (Monaghan 149).The reviewer for the New Republic noted that Bulosan witnessed and sharedin the tragedy which of all tragedies is the greatest that can come to workerson the land loss of ownership of that land (Lynch 7).Both the narrator and Carlos Bulosan, H.T.Tsiang, and U.S.Literary Market 143these commentators remarked how this agrarian background allowed Carlos to survive in the west coast hell he found in the vestibule of America (Monaghan149).As yeomen, the folk protagonists of America (particularly the narrator sfather) embody the disciplined personalities necessary for civilization, yet areuncorrupted by the degeneracy often associated with the modern world.Theirmigration to America, then, could serve to re-implant the values of the oldLincoln Republic onto American shores, values that had long ago been lost byits natives. In The Grapes of Wrath, published seven years earlier, Steinbeck svirtuous Okies were shown to have reached the natural limit of westwardexpansion in California; unable to reestablish a republic of small farms there,Steinbeck suggested they would express their old, yeoman virtue in new collec-tivist impulses that would reshape American culture along the lines of the NewDeal.Bulosan s narrator and his dispossessed yeoman compatriots also arrivein California, but from the other direction.Arriving from a different yet uncan-nily similar landscape, they bore the scars of a westward expansion that hadstretched across the Pacific and far beyond the vision of Steinbeck.Unlike theOkies, the earlier beneficiaries of territorial expansion, they called into questionwhether U.S.colonial impulses ever rewarded the virtuous.In pushing theirintegrity eastward, they reminded American readers that true social renewal liesnot in the conquest of literal space but in embracing the collectivist values ofracial outsiders who embody the heart of their nation.Finally, the narrator s constructed agrarian heritage, along with the tena-cious ability of the Filipino characters to hold on to this heritage in the U.S.,makes them eligible to write themselves into the American landscape.In theoft-discussed conclusion, the narrator Carlos rides in a train alone, travel-ing along the West Coast and reflecting on his strong bond to the Americansoil:.I heard bells ringing from the hills like the bells that had tolled inthe church tower when I had left Binalonan.I glanced out of the windowagain to look at the broad land I had dreamed so much about, only todiscover with astonishment that the American earth was like a huge heartunfolding warmly to receive me.It was something that had grownout of my defeats and successes, something shaped by my struggles for aplace in this vast land, digging my hands into the rich soil here and there,catching a freight to the north and to the south, seeking free meals indingy gambling houses, reading a book that opened up worlds of heroicthoughts.(326) 144 Carlos Bulosan, H.T.Tsiang, and U.S.Literary MarketThe narrator s claim that the American earth was like a huge heart unfoldingwarmly to receive me was certainly premature; Bulosan died in poverty, alco-holism, and obscurity in a Seattle street in 1956, apparently after collapsing therein a drunken stupor (Kim 45 46).Yet his use of American landscape imageryin this passage is significant.Denning identified one of the central problems ofthe Lincoln Republic narrative as Whose lives embody the Lincoln republic?Whose voice can tell its story? ; and this formal problem applies to other nos-talgic narratives of the people as well (169).As I have argued, Ma Joad s famousstatement We re the people was a white Anglo-Saxon claim to universality.Bulosan expressed a disappointment with Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, andMargaret Mitchell Mitchell for her overt racism, and Steinbeck and Caldwellfor failing to craft a weapon strong enough to blast the walls that imprisonedthe American soul ( My Education 128, America 238).His frustration withthem suggests an awareness that his story, or anything useful to him, was miss-ing from their portraits of the land.The conclusion of America does not stakea claim to a fixed location in the U.S.( America is to be viewed as a sensibility,after all), nor does it position the narrator as the quintessential American.Butits use of agrarian and landscape images the American earth, digging myhands into the rich soil, the broad perspective is important in that Bulosan,as a Filipino author, is declaring his right to the authorship of a conventional,naturalized aesthetic of U.S.nationalism.In essence, he is positioning himselfnot only as a constitutive part but also as a master narrator of the AmericanWest Coast landscape, a landscape that, as Don Mitchell reminds us, had beenpredicated upon the silence of working-class and nonwhite people for its aes-thetic value (20).While it created a momentary questioning of American intervention andformed an effective rhetorical call for Filipino inclusion in the U.S., the way inwhich Bulosan rendered visible Filipino migration to the U.S.posed dangers forco-optation within the discourse that Christina Klein calls Cold War Oriental-ism. After World War II, Klein argues, Cold Warriors put forth an image of aracially and ethnically diverse U.S.in order to appeal to decolonizing nationsand legitimize American global expansion
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