The Manong’s ‘Songs of Love:’ Gendered & Sexualized Dimensions of Carlos Bulosan’s Literature & Labor Activism
Bulosan’s literature and labor activism force us to consider the complex entanglement of racial, proletariat, gendered, and sexual marginalization that not only drove the granting of Philippine independence and the emergence of contemporary Filipino America, but still deeply affects the experiences and life conditions of Filipinas and Filipinos in diaspora now.
This article takes the 2013 passage of California Assembly Bill 123, which mandates instruction on the Filipino contribution to the state’s farm workers movement in public education curriculum, as an occasion to analyze the gendered and sexualized dimensions of Carlos Bulosan’s literature and labor activism. The article considers the texts and contexts of America is in the Heart and Bulosan’s short story As Long as the Grass Shall Grow to demonstrate how Bulosan’s materialist, dialectical analysis also involves an incisive critique of the intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality.
As Bulosan narrates the proletariat struggles of the manong generation, he reveals how the Filipino immigrant’s status as racialized labor is also gendered and sexualized therefore necessitating that one’s labor activism be defined by an anti-patriarchal and anti-heteronormative stance. In this way, Bulosan presents us with a potentially expansive model of Filipino political consciousness, a model that is not restricted to a masculine revolutionary practice characterized by a laboring brotherhood.
Furthermore, it is a revolutionary practice that by its very nature resists a toothless multicultural inclusion in state and national history and highlights the racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence of both US neocolonialism and domestic racism. Ultimately, this article insists that Bulosan calls for an intersectional liberatory praxis that is both anticolonial and anti-capitalist.
View the article on Ateneo de Manila University (opens in a new window).