If You Want To Know What We Are: A Carlos Bulosan Reader, and: The Mojo Hands Call, I Must Go, and: She Had Some Horses, and: Fightin': New and Collected Stories (review)

180 the minnesota review Wayman writes with passion in all these poems, whether he is writing about taking the names of dead people out of his address book, talking with another worker on an assembly Hne, or sitting down in a bar with his needs personified in front of him. Of course, the need Wayman is most interested in is "Social Change," a concern running through all these poems. In "The Privacy Poem," for Robert BIy, Wayman criticizes BIy and others like him for their lack of concern with social change in their writing: When someone writes there is a light in the leg of a hen that is the same Ught Moses saw as a pillar of fire crossing the Sinai by night I am fiUed again with the weariness that plagued us all those years on the Left. What help have these words been to another person that anyone should believe what they say? What is fresh and strong about the work of writers like Wayman, Fried, and Doro are the people in their writing coping with jobs, unemployment, the struggle to maintain a life apart from work, the struggle not to be eaten up by anger and bitterness, the struggle, ultimately, as Wayman writes, not to let those who ". . . possess a man or a woman's time/. . . spend the human beings who Uve in that time/Uke a coin or a doUar." JIM DANIELS if You Want To Know What WeAre: A Carlos Bulosan Reader. Ed. E. San Juan, Jr. with an introduction by Leigh Bristol-Kagan. Minneapolis: West End Press, 1983. 80 pp. $4.50 (paper). Sterling D. Plumpp. The Mojo Hands Call, IMust Go. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1982.93 pp. $5.95 (paper). Joy Harjo. SAe Had Some Horses. New York. Thunder's Mouth Press, 1983. 74 pp. $6.95 (paper). Simon J. Ortiz. Fightin': New and Collected Stories. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1983.Ill pp. $6.95 (paper). Carlos Bulosan's writing brought the Philippines, and especiaUy the Filipino farm laborer in the U.S., to the forefront of the American consciousness in the late 1930s and during the Second World War. With the rise of aesthetic criticism in the post-war era, however, Bulosan's work was relegated to the status of a Uterary curiosity or, at best, an example of local color. In addition, the grant of independence to the PhUippines in 1946 diminished his literary reputation in the U.S. as his work could not be classified neatly as either American or Filipino. Finally, the quest for a new national identity in the PhUippines was accompanied by misinterpretation of Bulosan's work, based on a superficial reading of his collective autobiographical novel, America Is in the Heart. In the last twenty years Bulosan's literary reputation has been refurbished as more of his work has become available and as its relevance to workers' struggles has been better perceived. The Delano grape strike of 1965, which led to the founding of the United Farm Workers, resulted from a long series of West Coast labor struggles going back, in part, to Bulosan and his contemporaries who organized the United Cannery and Packing House Workers of America under the CIO in 1938. As supporters of the Delano strike found meaning in the writings of Bulosan in the mid-sixties, Filipino nationaUsts—rejecting genteel reformism and taking to the barricades in the spring of 1970—rediscovered in Bulosan a peasant sensibility of great depth. The present coUection contains three essays showing the development of Bulosan's thought on labor and his concurrent development as a writer, as well as six stories and six reviews 181 poems. The first story, "Passage into Life," presents vignettes of Ufe in the PhUippines—the poverty of his family, the cheapness of peasant Uves, the arrogance of the landed class, and an undying hope for the future. The other five stories pick up these themes among FiUpino workers in America, erasing from the minds of readers any imagined differences between the so-called developed and undeveloped worlds. Indeed, Bulosan's irony is so powerful that at times the reader can scarcely believe that this tragic...