While reading Carlos
Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, I
did not understand why the gambling house and restaurants were primarily Chinese
owned. Throughout Part II the book, there
were many references to Chinese businesses.
Bulosan wrote of the gambling houses near the labor camps and chop suey
restaurants that he frequented. Ronald
Takaki explains in Strangers from a Different Shore of how the Chinese were “pushed out of competition for
employment” and “many Asian immigrants became shopkeepers, merchants, and small
businessmen”. As immigrants flooded into
the West, farm labor work became increasingly sporadic. This resulted in the development of Asian businesses and a union of
Asian communities. But why were Filipino
businesses so uncommon then?
Filipinos were
conditioned more as laborers than enterprisers.
Takaki writes that “Self-employment was not an Asian cultural trait”. In The
Pilipinos in America, Antonio J.A. Pido explains that during the Spanish colonial
rule in the Philippines, “foreign trade was a government monopoly and local
retail trade was relegated to the Chinese”.
In America is in the Heart, Bulosan
frequently reminds his readers that farming and labor were the mainstay of
Filipino employment.
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| Filipino farm workers, Pajaro Valley, near Watsonville, September 1939 |
