45 pages • 1 hour read
Carlos BulosanAmerica is in the Heart
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1946A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 26-31Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 26 Summary
Allos meditates on the fact that what he calls the “old world” (193) will die. Everything will pass away, including the stifling conditions from which he arose. The next few months are the first of his true intellectual freedom as his magazine, The New Tide, is released. José and Allos distribute 100 copies and feel that it is a victory for the Filipino people. Although the magazine goes out of print quickly, the passion that gave birth to it remains. Allos sees its death as the death of old ways of thinking.
Allos returns to the Santa Maria Valley and finds that one of the prominent workers’ unions is dissolving. In the course of attending various lectures and protests, Allos learns that government resistance to their cause is fierce. Allos plans a union meeting between a prominent Mexican and a Filipino farm-labor contractor, but sheriffs' deputies disrupt the meeting. They move the meeting to an empty barn outside Oxnard. During the meeting, cars arrive outside. Allos covers himself and José with manure, and they escape detection as white men search the barn.
On their way to Ventura, they are arrested for vagrancy but released after three days. They go to Lompoc and find that a strike is in progress among the lettuce workers.
Chapter 27 Summary
Allos takes a position as a union secretary, but the strikes he helps organize are all broken quickly and violently. José’s white girlfriend Helen encourages them to use firearms and violence during the strikes. She is soon revealed to be an agent working for anti-union interests, paid to fracture the unity among the union workers. The more agitation she can drum up, the more reason the authorities will have to put the strikes down with force rather than negotiating. Allos hates the influence she has over José, with whom she lives as “husband and wife.” Allos goads her until she admits that she hates Filipinos. In response, Allos strikes her in the mouth with a telephone. Afterwards, he reflects not on his own violence, but on Helen and her duplicity.
Chapter 28 Summary
As terrorism descends upon the Filipino Workers’ Association, the civil liberties of the farm laborers are in jeopardy. José, Allos, and other workers meet in San Francisco with a reporter named Millar. Afterwards, they scatter to various parts of California to continue to fight for workers’ rights. The dream of a better America consumes Allos.
In Santa Maria, Allos receives a letter from Millar stating that trouble is on its way to San Jose. When the Filipino workers strike to protest drastically-cut wages, the bosses import Mexican laborers who are willing to work for lower pay. Allos and José encourage some of the Mexican workers to strike with the Filipinos. The Mexicans are enthusiastic and agree to help. However, that night, five white men arrive at a meeting and take José, Allos, and Millar away in their car. They drive them into the woods and force them out of the vehicle.
The white men dump tar on José’s legs and set them on fire. They beat Millar to the ground. After tying Allos to a tree, they beat him savagely and squeeze his testicles. Millar gets close enough to tell Allos that he has a knife in his shoe. Allos manages to cut his ropes and escape while the white men are drunk.
In San Jose, Allos hides in a house when he sees a police car pass. Marian, the woman who lives there, feeds him and lets him sleep there for the night. In the morning, she drives him to Los Angeles.
Chapter 29 Summary
On the way to Los Angeles, Allos and Marian grow close. When they arrive in Los Angeles, Allos spends three days trying and failing to locate Macario. When Marian returns, she gives him a roll of money and says he can use it to go to the university. On the way home from a famous Hollywood night club, Marian faints. Days later, she is dead. A doctor tells Allos she died of syphilis.
Chapter 30 Summary
On the way to Seattle, Allos drinks a pint of whiskey in Bakersfield, starting a dark pattern. Without understanding why, he turns heavily to alcohol.
Allos travels to Santa Maria to meet José, who plans a resistance campaign. Allos returns to Los Angeles to continue the work, where he finally locates Macario.
After receiving compliments about his poetry from Macario’s friend, Dora Travers, Allos feels like a new man. Later, when he is alone, Allos begins to cough and cannot stop. There is blood in the sink when he is done. A doctor arrives and diagnoses him with tuberculosis, the same disease that killed Luciano.
Chapter 31 Summary
Allos is unsure how the disease will affect him. At first, all he wants to do is get back to work. Macario brings him food and takes care of him.
Meanwhile, several of Allos’s poems appear in an edition of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Alice Odell, a young woman in Hollywood, reads Allos’s poems and writes to him. Herself a writer, Alice wants Allos to read her unfinished novel. Despite his illness, Allos agrees to meet her at the Los Angeles Public Library. Too weak to walk, a self-conscious Allos writes a note to her instead. Over time, the two grow very close.
One day, Alice sneaks into his room and reads to him from Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. The boy in the novel reminds them both of Allos. Soon, this tranquil period ends, as Allos is hospitalized for his worsening tuberculosis. Alice returns to New York, but the two continue to correspond via letters.
Chapters 26-31 Analysis
In these chapters, Allos evolves from a burgeoning political thinker and writer into a true participant in the workers’ struggles—and pays the price for it. Writing is an act of resistance, but it can be done from a relatively safe remove. Actively participating in the organization and its strikes places him in harm’s way at a new level, as evidenced by the abduction and torture Millar, Allos, and José experience near the end of Chapter 28.
Helen is a pivotal character in that she is the only white woman who takes such an aggressive, racist stance towards the Filipinos in the book. Her attitudes go beyond those of the young white woman who referred to them as savages during Allos’s voyage to America. Helen is aggressive, using her sexual abilities as tools of manipulation and blatantly stating that she hates Filipinos. When Allos strikes her with the phone, he apparently feels no remorse. Hating Filipinos, and acting as she acted, is enough of an affront to merit a beating without regrets in Allos’s mind.
Chapters 29 through 31, meanwhile, show Allos finally make long-sought human connections, primarily through his writing. In so many ways, writing becomes Allos’ salvation—personally, professionally, and spiritually. Sadly, illness ultimately deprives him of these connections—first Marian’s syphilis, and later his own tuberculosis, which waylays him in a hospital bed for a long period of time. From Marian to Alice, Allos tends to find far greater support from white women than he does from white men.
