the FBI File of Filipino Author Carlos Bulosan (original) (raw)

Carlos Bulosan

Hounded to Death: the FBI File of Filipino Author Carlos Bulosan

Now that the election is over, better figure the Bush administration will quickly celebrate the mid-term victory as a show of strength, and as some sort of mandate.

Move over Democrats, the real war Republicans want is the one against Iraq.

And that means if you’re an outspoken critic against the war, you can count on adding to your FBI file. Sure, you have one. But don’t worry. Some of the finest Americans have had one.

JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., Marilyn Monroe. Carlos Bulosan.

Carlos Bulosan?

Yep.

On one key document, the word “SECRET” can be clearly read.

Another rubber-stamped mark screams, “CONFIDENTIAL.”

But by now, after more than 50 years, both words are crossed-out and the word “unclassified” trumps all the others.

The story can finally be revealed.

For a six-year period starting in 1950, the FBI conducted a systematic surveillance of Bulosan, a man thought to be a threat to U.S. national security interests.

Bulosan, who found his way from the Philippines to America in the 1930s, became the literary voice in English of Asian immigrants of his day.

But the FBI thought he was part of an international communist conspiracy.

Bulosan is best known for his graphic and realistic tale of the immigrant experience, America is in the Heart.

If you’re not familiar with this seminal work, Bulosan scholar E. San Juan described it as “the documentation of the varieties of racist discrimination, ostracism, exploitation and wholesale dehumanization suffered by Filipinos in the West Coast and Alaska in the decade beginning with the Depression up to the outbreak of WWII.”

“I came to know that in many ways, it was a crime to be Filipino in California — I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit. And this crime is that I am a Filipino in America,” reads Bulosan’s most quoted passage.

Little did Bulosan know, the FBI would later substantiate his fictional lament. The FBI file’s key document is dated Nov. 4, 1950 and comes from no other than FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It’s written to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and carbon copied to the top surveillance officials at the Department of State, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the FBI’s Washington field office.

“This is an indication the government considered Bulosan a very serious threat,” said Marilyn Alquizola, a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her spouse and Asian American Studies colleague Lane Hirabayashi is even more blunt.

“He scared the hell out of them,” said Hirabayashi. “It indicates the level of paranoia that existed.”

For the Bulosan files, we have Alquizola and Hirabayashi to thank. Six years ago, after yet another revelation of the FBI’s suspicion of a celebrity, Alquizola wondered if Bulosan would have been under scrutiny.

It was a good bet.

Bulosan, as a voice of the immigrant laborer, had long been suspected of being on a communist blacklist in the ’50s. Yet nothing was proven. Alquizola and Hirabayashi filed a Freedom of Information Act request six years ago in part to see what revealing information a government search would reap. Only last year did they get the Bulosan file, heavily censored with black markings covering the names of informants, many believed to be from the Filipino community.

Alquizola says the FBI showed no attempt to evaluate the information, making the Bulosan dossier a “tapestry of fact, rumor, partial lies and gross misinterpretations.”

Indeed, the FBI never arrested or charged Bulosan.

But all it took was someone in Seattle to inform the FBI that Bulosan bragged about being a member of the Communist Party, or about having information on revolutions about to break out in the Philippines, Japan, Korea and Formosa, and Bulosan was placed under suspicion for the rest of his life.

Such were government actions during the Cold War. The climate seems to have chilled again as surveillance of ordinary citizens in the name of the “war on terrorism” becomes an increasing concern.

“The tragedy of 9-11 makes Bulosan’s work and his victimization doubly relevant,” Alquizola told a conference on Filipino Americans at the University of Connecticut’s Asian American Cultural Center this fall. “Bulosan was at risk because of his political beliefs — expressed in his work and his writing. These activities were both domestic and international in scope and eventually got the federal government’s attention.”

The files indicate the FBI sought information wherever they could. They collected data in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Central Valley. Agents went everywhere and inquired about everything: credit records, tax records and his mail.

One memo from the FBI’s L.A. bureau reads: “A copy of this letter is being furnished to the San Francisco Office for its information since (BLACKED OUT NAME) advised that subject (Bulosan) may apply for a position with the San Francisco Chronicle.”

Hirabayashi said this was a common and effective tactic to derail employment of suspects. Who knows? Bulosan may have been the Filipino Rob Morse. But by the end of his life, the FBI’s surveillance rendered Bulosan unemployable.

And this is where Hirabayashi feels the new information will help. Once hailed as the realistic immigrant voice and published by the mainstream in publications like The New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar, Bulosan’s reputation is in bad need of restoration. The 1950s saw Bulosan’s life head downhill fast. The popular biographies routinely call him a peripatetic wanderer, “penniless,” “sickly.” And there’s mention of that ever-present demon, “rotgut wine.”

But as the files show, Bulosan’s demise was aided by the FBI.

Bulosan died Sept. 11, 1956 in Seattle of malnutrition and tuberculosis; a true amok Filipino, stripped of his liberties and hounded to death.

Alquizola, who is now preparing a book with Hirabayashi on the files, says the fact that he did keep writing through it all remains his testament as an artist. The final Bulosan novel, The Cry and the Dedication, a tale of guerrilla warfare in the Philippines, published post-humously, shows Bulosan pulled no punches as he endured the FBI’s constant vigil.

Alquizola calls it Bulosan’s “final defiance.”

Reach Emil Guillermo at emil@amok.com.