Flight in Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart

Critical Questions: How are multiple Americas and worlds explicated in America Is in the Heart? How does flight tie into the production of the narrator's political consciousness? What role does flight serve in the text?

For my paper, I am interested in pursuing the meaning and material effects of flight in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart. Flight comes up time and time again throughout the text, always in moments when the narrator Carlos is threatened. When he first arrives in the United States, Carlos feels that it is “like coming home after a long voyage” even though he “ha[s] no home” there (Bulosan 99). However, this positive hope quickly dissipates when he and his friends find themselves broke and unable to pay rent, and are sold into indentured labor at a fish cannery by their landlord (Bulosan 100-101). Carlos learns that his “life in America” will come to be “a long flight that carrie[s] [him]” and allows him no respite from precarity and poverty (Bulosan 101). He continues to run from situations that turn violent and risky, such as the theft of Filipino workers’ wages by a crew leader at an apple-picking job (Bulosan 107-109). These are the material manifestations of Carlos’ flights, and they are a necessary outgrowth of the precarious economic situation Filipinos are placed in by their status as immigrants, noncitizens, and people of color.

            However, I am even more interested in the function of flight as a concept that emerges through both the material and the internal psychic aspects of these experiences. After Carlos is released from his servitude in the fish cannery, he returns to Seattle. Once there, he says:

           

I was already in America, and I felt good and safe. I did not understand why. The gamblers, prostitutes, and Chinese opium smokers did not excite me, but they aroused in me a feeling of flight. I knew that I must run away from them, but it was not that I was afraid of contamination. I wanted to see other aspects of American life, for surely these destitute and vicious people were merely a small part of it. Where would I begin this pilgrimage, this search for a door into America? (Bulosan 104)

This passage is remarkable because Carlos is thrown into a psychic state of flight between two entirely separate and contradictory notions of America. That “destitute and vicious people” fill him with “a feeling of flight” [my emphasis] confirms that flight functions at the material and affective level. That is, flight is the ambiguous ontological condition that results from the experience of economic dispossession. Carlos’ original belief about America is that the criminal classes, drug users, and others are only an incidental failure of its generally benevolence. This is the means by which he is able to say, “I was already in America, and I felt good and safe.” Yet Carlos seems to sense the limits of this expectation when he feels he “must run away” to “search for a door into America” [my emphasis]. He realizes he is not yet there yet at all, but rather located in its outside. However, Carlos does not fear “contamination” because he still sees himself as separate from those who have been poisoned, or ontologically refigured, by a cruel and undesirable desperation. He believes that they are still a part of America, but that he must also find “a door into” the real America, one in which these figures of flight are absent.

What flight achieves, then, is a materialization of the interaction between “America” and the dispossession of people. Although it remains unapparent to the narrator, flight, as movement and a “feeling” exuded by particular kinds of subjects, is in fact absolutely vital to the constitution of America. As the novel progresses, the proletarian form becomes a complex struggle to arrive at a “good” and “safe” America, which is played out in the constant oscillation between flight and the return to temporarily stable territories. Carlos’ original purity from the “contamination[s]” of desperation does not last long, and he will find himself, like his fellow Filipinos, so “ruthless” that he fears he will “never feel like a human being again” (Bulosan 109). But that he manages to escape the full extent of ontological violence seen in his peers is contingent, very specifically, on his taking advantage of the open possibilities that emerge when one is in flight.