How do the experiences of Carlos Bulosan in America Is in the Heart demonstrate how immigrants in early twentieth-century America were at once both welcome and unwelcome in the nation? How might this contradictory experience serve to explain Bulosan's complicated relationship to the idea of America?

Carlos Bulosan was born in 1913 in the Philippines. Like most people in his country, he wanted a better life for himself. After struggling and suffering for years in his home country, he immigrated to the United States in 1930 at the age of seventeen. During this time, America was deep in the Great Depression, racial tensions were quite high, and discrimination against minority groups was prevalent. The country's economic and social bitterness influenced how whites treated minority groups, including Filipino Americans. Tensions were so intense at the time, in fact, that Bulosan was attacked by angry whites. Immigrants were especially unwelcome by many nativists, racists, and white supremacists, and the unwelcome treatment immigrants received—in the form of discriminatory signs, hostile treatment, lack of access to accommodations, violence, and more—reinforced a cruel image of America.
Simultaneously, America was viewed as compassionate. America, after all, promised opportunity and freedom for all immigrants, regardless of skin color, nationality, or religion. Carlos witnessed this compassion when he was admitted to a hospital after being attacked by the group of whites. The care he received was respectful and tolerant. Because of this treatment and the way he perceived American whites who assimilated into his home country, he remained hopeful that he could better his life in America. In this way, he perceived America as a force for both good and evil.
Toward the end of his life, Carlos still believed that America was a nation in which relationships between various races and nationalities could be improved upon and made peaceful, and he worked to fulfill what he saw as the potential promise of a compassionate country as embodied in the Constitution.