Carlos Bulosan, Walt Whitman, and the Transnational Jeremiad

In 1935, the Filipino American writer and activist Carlos Bulosan (19131956) was living in Los Angeles when he vowed to continue his informal literary education. Disillusioned by the racism and class-based discrimination he encountered everywhere on the West Coast, Bulosan turned to literature in order to understand the historical forces that had shaped his experiences as a field hand and urban laborer among his fellow Filipino American immigrants. Once he devoted himself to his autodidactic mission, Bulosan spent his days at the Los Angeles Public Library. As he details in his essay “My Education,” which was published posthumously in a 1979 issue of Amerasia devoted to Bulosan, reading allowed him to contextualize his marginalized life by turning to what many might consider an unlikely canonical source: the poetry of Walt Whitman. Bulosan recalls: