[As the
author of a book on
the contested history of American patriotism, every day of 2025 feels strikingly
relevant. So for this year’s July 4th series, I wanted to share
& expand on excerpts from that book that feature models of critical
patriotism from across our history, leading up to a weekend request for further
conversations!]
On one of
our most poetic and powerful patriotic passages.
The book
excerpt: “While the Joads [in John Steinbeck’s novel The
Grapes of Wrath] experience some of the worst of the period’s
oppressions and destructions, the Filipino immigrant, migrant laborer, and
author Carlos
Bulosan (1913–1956) experienced those and much more besides. Bulosan immigrated
to the United States in 1930 at the age of 16, and for the next decade worked
as a migrant laborer throughout the Western U.S., witnessing not only the
economic and social hierarchies and divisions that Steinbeck depicts, but the
era’s exclusionary prejudice and violence targeting Filipino Americans,
including constant police brutality, outbreaks of racial terrorism such as the 1930
Watsonville, (California) massacre, and legal discriminations such as the
1934 Tydings-McDuffie
Act and 1935 Filipino
Repatriation Act. As I trace in my book We
the People, those anti-Filipino exclusions were a defining element of
early 20th century America, and reflect the ways in which the Depression’s
myths affected immigrant and minority communities with especial force.
Bulosan
documents all those exclusions and horrors in depth and with graphic detail in
his first book, the autobiographical novel America
is in the Heart (1946). But from its title on, that stunning work
offers a critical patriotic perspective, one that refuses to turn away from all
that Bulosan has experienced and witnessed yet likewise refuses to abandon his
fundamental belief in America’s community and ideals. In the book’s final
lines, he expresses that vision of the nation with particular clarity and
power: “It was something that grew out of the sacrifices and loneliness of my
friends, of my brothers in America and my family in the Philippines—something
that grew out of our desire to know America, and to become a part of her great
tradition, and to contribute something toward her final fulfillment. I knew
that no man could destroy my faith in America that had sprung from all our
hopes and aspirations, ever” (Bulosan’s emphasis). That final “our” is
to my mind intentionally ambiguous, encompassing not only Bulosan’s family and
cultural community, but all those Americans whose struggles and hopes
constitute the idealized nation that he, like [John] Dos Passos and Steinbeck,
imagines and contributes to.”
I’m not going
to pretend I can follow up with anything that will be as eloquent as what
Bulosan already wrote there, but I do want to add one thing to my own analysis
of that beautiful closing passage. I really love that Bulosan links not only
his “brothers in America” (by which he means his actual brothers, but of course
also the broader Filipino American community) but also his “family in the
Philippines” (by which ditto on both levels) to this process of knowing, becoming
part, and contributing to America’s community, tradition, and final
fulfillment. Far too often, even those of us who fully support the equal place
of immigrant communities in the United States act as if it is only those folks
in the U.S. who are part of that national identity. But the truth, as anyone
with any experience of immigration in any way knows well, is that these
families and communities and cultures maintain global connections, and thus
make them part of our American story and identity as well. Making that case, as
Bulosan does quickly but potently, is a profoundly critical patriotic
perspective.
Last
patriotic model tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Models of patriotism you’d share?
