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Carlos Bulosan (1913-56) http://tinyurl.com/Bulosan

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A World of Hope

From America Is in the Heart, 1946.

Reader: Daniel Maloney

Carey McWilliams believed that American values—the ones we celebrate but don't always observe—are invigorated by those who struggle for equal opportunity or due process or equal enforcement of the law.

McWilliams had in mind his friend, Carlos Bulosan, who left his native Philippines for America in 1931. As an itinerant worker, writer, and labor organizer, Bulosan saw first hand the discouragments of discrimination on the west coast. Seriously ill from turbuculosis, an invalid in the contagious ward of a Los Angeles hospital, Bulosan nevertheless found hope in American tradition.

I felt that I was at home with the young American writers and poets. Reading them drove me back to the roots of American literture—to Walt Whitman and the tumult of his time. And from him, from his passionate dream of an America of equality for all races, a tremendous idea burned in my consciousness. Would it be possible for an immigrant like me to become a part of the American dream? Would I be able to make a positive contribution toward the realization of this dream?

I was enchanted by this dream, and the hospital, dismal as it was, became a world of hope. I discovered the other democratic writers and poets, who in their diverse ways contributed toward the enlargement of the American dream.

Carlos Bulosan published America Is in my Heart in 1946, his own powerful contribution to that "enlargement of the American dream."