Carlos Bulosan and the Manong Generation: What the Record Shows
Carlos Bulosan and the Manong Generation: What the Record Shows
Migrant laborer, union editor, and author of America Is in the Heart, Carlos Bulosan wrote the manong generation into the American record. Here is what archives and reference sources confirm about his life, his work, and where to find him.
October is Filipino American History Month, and any honest accounting of it has to make room for the men who worked America's canneries and fields long before anyone thought to write their names down. Carlos Bulosan was one of those men, and he was also the one who wrote it down. He was a migrant worker, a union man, and a writer, and he put the manong generation on the page in English, for an American readership.
His life is retold in many places, and not all of them agree. His best-known book blurs memoir and fiction, and even his birth year is disputed. So this profile sticks to what university archives, libraries, and reference sources support, and says plainly where they conflict. If you are new to the month, start with our October 1 opener, “Who Built Filipino American History Month?”
In Binalonan, Pangasinan, September 11, the day Bulosan died, has been Carlos S. Bulosan Day since a 2006 town ordinance. A decade later, local reporting still described him as little known in his own hometown.
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Welga — WEL-gah
A strike, a work stoppage. The word comes from the Spanish huelga. UC Davis named its Welga Archive for it, because the archive began with the Filipino farmworkers of the Delano grape strike.
Born to Ilocano Parents in Pangasinan
Bulosan was born in Binalonan, Pangasinan, to Ilocano parents. The Academy of American Poets places his birth in a farming village called Mangusmana. The University of Washington Libraries' finding-aid biography says he had about three years of formal schooling, began working as a day laborer at 11, and left home to support himself at 13.
Seattle, Alaska, and the Fields
Bulosan left for the United States in 1930 as a teenager and never returned to the Philippines. (Most sources say 1930; the UW finding-aid summary says 1931.) According to that finding-aid biography, within two days of reaching Seattle he was shanghaied by a hotel proprietor and sold to an Alaskan fish cannery. When the season ended he came back to Washington and worked as a migrant farm laborer, mostly in Washington and California.
From 1935 to 1941, the same biography says, he tried to organize migrant workers into unions and began writing about their conditions, especially those of Filipino workers. He was also contributing to small labor and immigrant publications in those years, New Tide among them.
Two Years in a Los Angeles Hospital
In 1936 Bulosan was hospitalized with tuberculosis at Los Angeles County's hospital, where he had three operations and spent about two years recovering. The UW biography says he began to write that year during the stay, publishing poetry in 1936 and short stories in 1938. In the record, the hospital stay is where his writing life begins.
The Books
Bulosan's output ran from small-press poetry to a New York trade publisher, and then, long after his death, to scholarly editions that kept him in print.
| Work | Year | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Letter from America | 1942 | Poetry. Prairie City, Illinois: J. A. Decker. |
| Chorus for America: Six Philippine Poets | 1942 | Anthology edited by Bulosan. Los Angeles: Wagon and Star. |
| The Voice of Bataan | 1943 | Poetry, published in New York. |
| The Laughter of My Father | 1944 | Short stories. Harcourt, Brace. |
| America Is in the Heart: A Personal History | 1946 | Harcourt, Brace. Reissued by the University of Washington Press in 1973 with an introduction by Carey McWilliams. |
| The Philippines Is in the Heart | 1978 | Stories edited by E. San Juan Jr. New Day Publishers, Quezon City. |
| If You Want to Know What We Are | 1983 | A Carlos Bulosan reader, edited by E. San Juan Jr. West End Press. |
| The Cry and the Dedication | 1995 | Novel, published after his death by Temple University Press. |
The 1946 book is subtitled A Personal History, but reference works describe it as autobiographical fiction, and one encyclopedia entry notes that Bulosan combined myth and fact to create a sense of authenticity. That is a reason to read it as literature rooted in a documented history, and to check any biographical detail that appears only in the book.
“America is not a land of one race or one class of men.” Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (1946)
“Freedom from Want,” 1943
In 1943 the Saturday Evening Post commissioned four writers to pair essays with Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms paintings. Bulosan's essay ran March 6, 1943, alongside Freedom from Want. The National Norman Rockwell Museum describes him as a relatively unknown novelist and poet, a Filipino immigrant and migrant worker who wrote on behalf of people enduring hardship at home. The other three essays were by Booth Tarkington, Will Durant, and Stephen Vincent Benét.
The essay repeats the line “If you want to know what we are.” That phrase later became the title of the 1983 Bulosan reader.
Back to Seattle: Local 37 and the 1952 Yearbook
In late 1951, according to a Seattle local-history account, Bulosan returned to Seattle as publicity director for the largely Filipino Alaska Cannery Workers Union, Local 37 of the ILWU. He edited the local's 1952 Yearbook. The UW Libraries exhibit says it was produced while Chris Mensalvas was the local's president and that it covered the union officers' fight against deportation, the union's history from 1948 to 1952, and the history of cannery workers and the industry, along with Bulosan's own editorial column.
Bulosan died in Seattle on September 11, 1956, of malnutrition and bronchopneumonia according to a biographical note that also says he had been blacklisted as a labor organizer and socialist writer. He is buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Queen Anne Hill. He wrote his own epitaph, and the UW Libraries exhibit notes that his grave was originally marked only by a blank stone.
The 1973 University of Washington Press reissue of America Is in the Heart and E. San Juan Jr.'s 1972 study, Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle, are two reasons Bulosan is still read and studied in universities.
Where the Record Lives Today
University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections holds the Carlos Bulosan papers, 1914–1976, with the bulk dating from 1948 to 1956. The bulk of one major accession was collected by the Bulosan Manuscript Committee in 1959. Photographs are held separately in PH Collection 1156, and the library's online exhibit, “Author, Poet, and Worker: The World of Carlos Bulosan,” puts the 1952 Yearbook on screen.
Seattle's International District. A permanent Carlos Bulosan Memorial Exhibit is at the Eastern Hotel. Activist Cindy Domingo is one of its founders.
Binalonan. Besides the annual Bulosan Day, there is a marker at his birthplace, and a 2016 Inquirer report said the town planned a Bulosan museum. His memorabilia, including letters to his brother, is displayed at the University of Eastern Pangasinan.
UC Davis. The Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies opened with a fundraising dinner on September 29, 2018. It sits in the Asian American Studies department and is directed by Robyn Rodriguez, who said Bulosan was chosen as its namesake for his labor work and his commitment to the most marginalized in the Filipino community. NBC News reported at the time that it was believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S. The center's Welga Archive began in 2014 around the Delano grape strike and the farmworker movement, and has since widened to other Filipino American activism. We cover the Bulosan Center in our UC Davis admissions guide for Fil-Am families.
Why FAHM Needs Him
Heritage months tend to drift toward the famous and the finished. Bulosan's record is neither. It is the record of a teenager with a few years of schooling, sold to a cannery within days of reaching Seattle, who organized, wrote, and edited his way into the Saturday Evening Post and, years later, into a union hall's yearbook. The union he served was fighting the deportation of its own officers. That is the manong generation in miniature: people who did the work, and then had to write, organize, and fight for the record of having done it.
For the Vallejo and Mare Island chapter of that same story, read our profile of Mel Orpilla, “Marks of the Ancestors: Mel Orpilla and the Filipino Story of Vallejo.” Bulosan wrote the manong generation into the national record. FAHM is how we keep it there.
- University of Washington Libraries Special Collections, Carlos Bulosan papers, 1914–1976 (finding aid, Archives West)
- Social Networks and Archival Context, Bulosan, Carlos (biography drawn from the UW finding aid)
- UW Libraries, “Author, Poet, and Worker: The World of Carlos Bulosan,” ILWU Local 37 1952 Yearbook page and bibliography
- UW Jackson School of International Studies, “Carlos Bulosan is in the Heart” (Feb. 13, 2015)
- Academy of American Poets, Carlos Bulosan
- Encyclopedia.com, Bulosan, Carlos 1911–1956
- Los Angeles poetry anthology biography, Bulosan Poems (PDF)
- The Saturday Evening Post, Carlos Bulosan’s “Freedom from Want”
- National Norman Rockwell Museum, Freedom from Want audio tour
- quezon.ph, “When Bulosan Met Quezon” (Jan. 16, 2019)
- Arab News, “Bulosan Finds Fame but Not Fortune in US”
- Life and Times in Leschi, “Frink Park 7: Carlos Bulosan, Part 2”
- Philippine Daily Inquirer Global Nation, “Immigrant finds strength, solace in Carlos Bulosan”
- Philippine Daily Inquirer, “Bulosan unknown even in hometown”
- Punch Dagupan, “September 11, Bulosan Day in Binalonan” (Sept. 10, 2006)
- NBC News, “UC Davis to open groundbreaking Filipino studies center”
- The California Aggie, “First Filipino-American research space at an American university opens at UC Davis”
- UC Davis Bulosan Center, About us; Welga Digital Archive, About; NCPH project listing
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