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Fbi philippino poet { October 8 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2002/10/08/eguillermo.DTLhttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2002/10/08/eguillermo.DTL
America was in the heart, but the FBI was in his life
Emil Guillermo, Special to SF Gate
Tuesday, October 8, 2002
©2002 SF Gate
When Carlos Bulosan died Sept. 11, 1956, he was often called a "penniless drunk" and not hailed as the great writer he was.
Now, new discoveries show we have the FBI to thank for that.
And even though it was nearly 50 years ago, Bulosan's story has much to say today about anyone with a minority perspective in this great democracy of ours.
Bulosan is a perfect subject for October, a month that just happens to be Filipino American History month, as designated by the Filipino American National Historical Society. No one embodies the early Filipino American experience quite like Bulosan, and then some.
His biography generally reads that he was a prolific writer and poet who first became known among literary circles in 1944 for the book "Laughter of My Father," which was excerpted in The New Yorker and Harper's Bazaar. It was an unlikely coup for a poor immigrant who followed his muse while working the kitchens and fields of California and Washington state, with occasional stints in Alaskan canneries. Along the way he also became a fervent union organizer who worked hard to improve conditions for his fellow laborers.
Ultimately, that experience became the backdrop for his 1946 novel "America Is in the Heart," a depiction of the curse and grit of immigrant life. Thanks to a somewhat patriotic flag-waving ending, the book is often seen as a triumph of the immigrant dream. But some, such as Bulosan scholar E. San Juan Jr., see it as just the opposite, as a "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 World War II."
Wrote Bulosan in the novel, "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."
The FBI sure took note. But it didn't give a hoot about exploited Filipino immigrants. It did want to know everything about Bulosan's labor activity and an alleged connection to the Communist Party.
And so, we now know that starting in 1950, Bulosan joined that exclusive roster of people that includes such luminaries as John Lennon (suspected of fomenting student revolution), Paul Robeson (suspected Communist), J. Edgar Hoover (suspected cross-dresser) and Martin Luther King Jr. (suspected womanizer): All of them were significant FBI targets, with surveillance files big enough to choke a modern shredder.
Lane Hirabayashi and his wife, Marilyn Alquizola, two Asian American Studies professors at the University of Colorado-Boulder, first requested Bulosan's file through the Freedom of Information Act in 1996. It took five years, but finally, all the names the FBI wanted to protect were blacked out on the file's documents and it was delivered to the scholars in July 2001.
At 200-plus pages, the file wasn't exactly the Cliffs Notes to Bulosan's body of work.
"What we have with this file is first-hand evidence from the FBI itself that it was more than casual surveillance," Hirabayashi told me at the recent Filipino American History Conference, sponsored by the Asian Cultural Center and the Asian American Studies Department of the University of Connecticut. "This was a systematic surveillance. And I think they damaged his reputation in the process."
Working with tipsters, the FBI suspected the immigrant writer/activist was a key figure in some global Communist conspiracy. Hirabayashi believes the suspicion began when Bulosan began writing of the Huks, an extreme revolutionary group in the Philippines.
When the Huks entered into his writing, the FBI's West Coast literary scholars dashed off a memo alerting the CIA, the Department of State, G2 (the army intelligence unit at the Pentagon), the Office of Naval Intelligence, the U.S. Air Force and the Washington state FBI field office. "It's an indication the U.S. government thought Bulosan was a very serious threat," said Hirabayashi. "For a writer to garner attention at this level, he must have scared the hell out of them."
At that point, Bulosan's career began to spiral downward. He couldn't find work. He started drinking. Current biographies only hint that Bulosan may have been blacklisted in the same way as Hollywood screenwriters such as Dalton Trumbo. But his FBI file does contain a memo that alerts the agency's San Francisco office that Bulosan was looking for a job as a writer at The Chronicle.
"It was a common tactic for agents to go in and derail employment opportunities in this way," Hirabayashi said. "There was no follow-up in the file. But by the end of his life, Bulosan could not get a job anywhere."
Sensitive to the standard portrayal of Bulosan as jobless, penniless, drunk and in poor health, Alquizola and Hirabayashi hope to balance all that with the truth -- that Bulosan's demise was due to an overarching factor: extreme duress from being under constant FBI harassment.
In the end, after six years of FBI money and staffing expended, the bureau could find no evidence connecting Bulosan to any communist conspiracy. Nothing.
It's little consolation for Bulosan, who, as mentioned, died in 1956 on Sept. 11 -- an odd coincidence, as the revelation of his old FBI file coincides with the emergence of new extreme tactics the agency is using to thwart post-9/11 international terror.
Hirabayashi and Alquizola, now preparing a new book on the Bulosan file, believe the backdrop of the current political climate is the real importance of their findings. And it goes well beyond the smallish world of Asian American academics and straight to the heart of mainstream American civil liberties.
With the USA Patriot Act, the FBI's powers are broader than ever. These days, you can be held secretly for months in jail. The FBI can put a religious or political gathering under surveillance without even suspecting a crime. Are there new Bulosans out there?
Are modern voices being muted out of fear?
"You can bet surveillance is being increased across the board," said Hirabayashi. "Many people will now be too intimidated to speak out and raise questions."
"If you're not for the war, you must be against America," Alquizola said about the act's stifling effect. She believes that what makes the Bulosan story ultimately more hopeful is that he did not go quietly. She calls his final novel of revolution in the Philippines, "The Cry and the Dedication," Bulosan's "final defiance" against the FBI.
But it will always be "America Is in the Heart" that people remember best.
In one scene, the narrator, a labor organizer, describes being beaten in the fields: "Another man, the one called Jake, tied me to a tree. Then he started beating me with his fists. Why were these men so brutal, so sadistic? A tooth fell out of my mouth, and blood trickled down my shirt. The man called Lester grabbed my testicles with his left hand and smashed them with his right fist. The pain was so swift and searing that it was as if there were no pain at all. There was only a stabbing heat that leaped into my head and stayed there for a moment."
That's fictional pain.
What the FBI inflicted was for real.
Emil Guillermo is a radio and TV commentator and the author of "Amok: Essays From an Asian American Perspective," winner of an American Book Award." E-mail: emil@amok.com
©2002 SF Gate
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