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This chapter deals with the novels of Carlos Bulosan and John Okada in the context of the Cold War and the racial politics of masculinity. Bulosan, a Filipino American, and Okada, a Japanese American, present their concerns about racial oppression through gender and sexuality, in this case through the lives of Asian American men who are deeply wounded by the racial violence and discrimination that often worked through emasculation. Okada's No No Boy and Bulosan's America Is in the Heart and The Cry and the Dedication are attempts to recuperate the wounded bodies of Asian American men, speaking to American society in terms that it could understand: freedom and materialism. The recuperated manhood they seek to establish is inevitably limited by the ways in which freedom and materialism are conceptually entangled with the same structure of racial discrimination and economic exploitation that targeted Asian Americans.

Carlos Bulosan’s story “The Romance of Magno Rubio” is about the plight of an illiterate Filipino field worker in Depression-era California going deeper and deeper into debt in order to woo a white American woman. This chapter argues that the story and its contemporary staged adaptation powerfully subvert accumulative values while also introducing a Filipino American alternative economy based on reciprocity and non-accumulation. The illiterate character Magno Rubio shows us how to read.

The early Asian American writers Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan conceived of modernity as progress toward the universal, and tried to capture this movement in their narrative’s structures. Attempting to portray the world in epic fashion, they use repetition to illustrate a continuous dialectical movement toward a higher unity. But the recurrence of objects, actions, and motions in their narratives ends up evoking the bleak, racialized and industrialized everyday of 1930s and 40s America: an abstract anywhere, populated by thing-like people who are linked and moved mechanically. Ironically, a certain epic immanence does arise from a racial barrier that infuses every aspect of the external world with meaning.

This chapter looks at the gendering and sexualizing of Filipino radicalism and transnational anti-imperialism in Carlos Bulosan's work. It places The Cry and the Dedication in the context of some of Bulosan's earlier work and in conversation with Huk leader Luis Taruc's autobiography, Born of the People (1953). Instead of addressing a story of increasing “revolutionary” consciousness, the chapter unveils some of the tensions and contradictions that arise as Bulosan seeks to insert a diasporic voice into the debates around “national liberation” and political radicalism. By offering a queer diasporic reading of Bulosan's work that highlights his self-authorizing endeavors, the chapter not only illustrates how his multivalent modes of address are articulated through sex, gender, and sexuality, but also gives some sense of the formal complexity of his writing.

Chapter one examines the formation of Asian American writers in the era of Asian exclusion through a comparative analysis of Younghill Kang’s and Carlos Bulosan’s responses to Orientalism in their works. As legal exclusion created the racial category of Asian in the United States, migrant Asian writers faced the challenge of creating modern Asian subjects in literary English. Cultural brokers between Orientalist images of their countries of origin and the modern experiences of Asian migrants in the United States, Kang and Bulosan tested the boundaries of English to represent migrant experiences lived in languages other than English. As a heterogeneous cultural epistemology, Orientalism placed different constraints on Kang, who contended with the Orientalist valorization of the Far East, and Bulosan, who resorted to the Filipino intellectual tradition of the ilustrado in the face of Orientalist primitivism.

This chapter assesses the question of resistance through the prolific career of Carlos Bulosan, the Filipino American worker, activist, and poet whose collective autobiography, America Is in the Heart (1946), is considered a foundational text in Asian American literary studies. Examining the complexities of the text’s regard for literary education and the utopian possibilities it holds for an inclusive public sphere, the chapter argues that Bulosan's text exposes the complex intimacies of education and uplift in a narrative that charts the social, political, and emotional costs of the exclusion of colonial subjects from the apparatus of progressive education that was the promise of the colonial occupation. As such, Bulosan forcefully contests the premise of American exceptionalism, illuminating the racialized and gendered hierarchies that have historically functioned to preserve the place of white masculinity at the center of the American imaginary.

This chapter aims to examine Bulosan’s nationalistic deployment of both “America” and the Philippines, as well as Tsiang’s nationalistic deployment of China, which are central to their unique configurations of global and national within the Popular Front. The goal is to highlight the kind of Asian American transnational politics that was possible within the U.S. literary market in the 1930s and 1940s. For writers Bulosan and Tsiang, to be legible as a “realist” was a major prerequisite for visibility. Bulosan and Tsiang’s experiences were very different when it came to finding an audience for their transnational projects. While Tsiang fled China on account of his left-leaning political activities and faced poverty and the ire of both the U.S. and Chinese governments, Bulosan had consistent access to mainstream newspapers and journals, where he was warmly received until a plagiarism case destroyed his literary reputation in 1946.

This chapter documents the migration of Filipinos conscripted for exploitive low-wage labor in the metropole, especially in West Coast agricultural fields and Alaska salmon canneries. The nativist, racist, and class hierarchies that animated the repressive, often violent response of white American citizens through both official law and social practice are chronicled, drawing on actual historical events and the semi-fictional literary accounts by Carlos Bulosan. The second half of the chapter recounts three case studies of early struggles by Filipino colonial nationals to mobilize rights – seeking citizenship for military service; permitting interracial marriage; and owning or leasing property to reclaim ownership of productive power. Chapter Two concludes by reflecting on the origins and manifestations of a distinctive Filipino “oppositional legal consciousness.”

This interchapter offers a history of Asian American fiction's engagement with African Americans and their culture as a contribution to the growing scholarship on African‐Asian American cultural connections. The two groups have a complex relationship: historically more violently abjected, African Americans are mythologically primary, and have been models for the political emergence of racially “in between” Asian Americans. A thread of connection to blackness appears in Asian American texts in unfulfilled plot segments, brief interludes of affiliation or sympathy for shared histories of minoritization, as in early texts by Younghill Kang, Carlos Bulosan, and John Okada. From the mid‐century, Asian American men's texts evince a paradoxical longing for unity with those more viscerally oppressed, in dramas of deeply vexed engagement with black male models of masculinity; Peter Bacho, Frank Chin, and Gus Lee are discussed. Recent fictions disrupt the Asian‐black binary, representing blacks amidst a more fluid, multiethnic social world. Asian American women's fiction shows a minor, steady strand of sympathetic engagement—unburdened by agonistic competition—with African Americans and black female precursors, who become models for emergent expressivity. Contemporary texts (Gish Jen) reveal class difference inhibiting Asian‐black solidarity, but powerful, ongoing influence by the black expressivity saturating American culture.

The epilogue summarizes the main arguments of the book and offers a brief history of Baguio since World War II. It draws connections between the formation of a reserve of Filipino labor at the start of the twentieth century and the Philippines’ current status as a supplier of cheap labor to employers around the world. It also links the clientelism and creation of a Filipino ruling class discussed in chapter 5 to the use of political office for private capital accumulation today. The chapter concludes by describing Baguio’s fate during World War II, when it was occupied by Japanese forces and became an internment center for American, English and Chinese residents, and its current status as home to economic zones selling skilled labor to foreign companies seeking to outsource manufacturing and service jobs.

The opening chapter summarizes the core themes and landmark events or developments in the historical narrative study from the initial colonial project of the US in the Philippines to the endemic “criminalization” of Filipino migrant workers in law and society, the second generation of worker’s aspirational political struggles, the murder of two reform leaders in 1981, and the devastating Wards Cove ruling in the late 1980s that rebuffed the workers’ claims and eviscerated civil rights law. After explaining the key terms in the book’s title – “by law” and “union” – the chapter outlines the core theoretical frameworks for the book, including legal mobilization theory, critical race theory, and racial capitalist analysis of the larger sociolegal context of workers’ rights struggles. Also discussed is the rationale for the historical research design, the constitutive approach to analysis of power, the role of Carlos Bulosan as literary chronicler and activist subject, and the unique, subtle epistemological and methodological standpoint of the book’s authors.