PANGASINAN

Carlos Bulosan was born in the Philippines in the rural farming village of Mangusmana, in the town of Binalonan ,Pangasinan. He was the son of a farmer and spent most of his upbringing in the countryside with his family.  Like many families in the Philippines, Carlos’s family struggled to survive during times of economic hardship. Many families were impoverished and many more would suffer because of the conditions in the Philippines created by US colonization.  Rural farming families like Carlos’ family experienced severe economic disparity due to the growing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the economic and political elite. Determined to help support his family and further his education, Carlos decided to come to America with the dream to fulfill these goals.

One of the earliest and most influential of Asian American writers, Bulosan emigrated from the Philippines in 1931. In the U.S., he worked in an Alaskan fish cannery and as a fruit and vegetable picker in Washington and California, and eventually became an activist in the labor movement. The horrendous conditions of Filipino laborers were fictionalized in his most famous work, America Is in the Heart (1946). Excerpts of his 1944 book, Laughter of My Father, were published in The New Yorker and Harper's Bazaar. Bulosan was commissioned by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 to write “Four Freedoms,” an essay for the Federal Building in San Francisco. His other books include the poetry collections Letter from America (1942), Chorus from America (1942), and The Voice of Bataan (1943), as well as the novels The Cry and the Dedication (written in the 1950s and published posthumously in 1995) and The Sound of Falling Light (1960).