Carlos Bulosan papers, 1914-1976

Carlos Sampayan Bulosan (c. 1911- September 11, 1956) was a Filipino American author, poet, and activist. A chronicler of the Filipino American experience in during the 1930s-early 1950s on the West Coast, he is best remembered for his semi-fictionalized autobiographical novel America Is In the Heart (1946). Though Bulosan was only 42-45 years old when he died of tuberculosis-complicated pneumonia in Seattle in 1956, he left behind a large body of poems, novels, short stories, plays, and correspondence on a wide range of interrelated topics. Bulosan's work described the experience of growing up poor in a rural area of the Philippines, chronicling the conditions of neocolonialism after American occupation and centuries of Spanish colonialism. Bulosan's work captures the "push" factors that drove himself his generation to the United States. Like Bulosan, they hoped to find a better future and forged resilient and adaptive communities in the face of an often-hostile and exploitative European American culture in the United States. Bulosan is remembered as a progressive anti-colonial, pro-labor, humanitarian voice by an array of communities including Asian/Pacific Islanders, organized labor, academics and intellectuals, and a wide array of social justice; ethnic; and activist communities.