America is in the Heart

Allos is the narrator of America is in the Heart. His life is loosely based on that of the author, Carlos Bulosan. While still a teenager, Allos moves to America, which he greatly romanticizes in his mind. Once there, he travels incessantly while undergoing constant disappointments. He seems incapable of sitting still. His dreams of becoming a writer make him more ambitious than many of the other Filipinos he meets in America, and his intellect gives him a chance to lead and influence the flurry of strikes and other union activity populating the final third of the book. Above all, Allos is a person who appears to be in a constant state of either self-doubt or complete confidence. When things go well, he is full of passion, but downward trends send him into spirals of worry, fury, and violence. When he is diagnosed with tuberculosis, he is forced to spend more time in his mind. This period of contemplation leads to most of his reflective acts and allows him to escape from his fear of himself.

Allos’s ambivalent attitude toward America comprises one of the book’s major themes. On one hand, Allos rightly bemoans the widely-held racist attitudes among whites toward Filipinos and other ethnic groups.