The purpose of this research is to examine what factors were important in explaining the nature of an Asian American identity prior to World War II. The plan of the research will be to describe factors that were common to all Asian American groups in this regard and then to discuss factors that were distinctive to the Filipino experience, with reference to the autobiography America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan.
An important fact about the identity of Asian American subgroups in the U.S. prior to World War II is the nature of America during that period. Workers were needed for growing American industries. In the West, farmers and farm laborers were needed to fill out the wide open spaces. Thus many Asians were recruited to enter the country as low-cost laborers--mainly Hawaii and the states on the West Coast. They were expected to stay temporarily and then return to the Philippines (McWilliams ix). This was partly because of several anti-immigration laws barring permanent immigration to specific Asian groups. Thus temporary resident workers had no need to adapt to the "hurly burly" of American culture and life. Once they arrived in America, they could seek out and stay with communities of nationals from their home country. But as Bulosan says of leaving the Philippines (93), he planned to return home one day.
America was the golden promised land for millions throughout the world before World War II, a land where a man born in a log cabin could become president (Bulosan 69). Bulosan refers to America as being in the hearts of those who die for freedom and in the eyes of those who build a new world (xxiv), and over some years that became his experience of America. But the journey was not easy. Bulosan describes how impossible it was for his family to build a full and prosperous life in a peasant village. The saddest part of his description of village life is the fate of Bulosan's father, who declined from a prosperous peasant ...