Filipino English

Poet, essayist, novelist, fiction writer, and labor organizer, Carlos Bulosan (1911-1956) wrote one of the most influential working class literary classics about the US pre-World War II, a period and setting similar to that of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row. Bulosan's semi-autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart begins with the narrator's rural childhood in the Philippines and the struggles of land-poor peasant families affected by US imperialism after the Spanish-American War of the late 1890s.

Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather's nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher.

When Filipino American and former US Air Force officer Analiza Quiroz (Wolf) was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in the Philippines, she had two goals. First, she wanted to talk with prostitutes near Clark Air Base to understand the US military's impact on their lives. Second, she wanted to talk with her family and learn about her Filipino roots. They seemed to be two separate goals reached by talking with people in two separate worlds. Never did she expect her two goals to overlap. Foreword by Ceres Alabado, Founding President of the Children's Literature Association of the ...

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