Hungering for America
But these foods of the elite were not everyday fare for the vast majority of the emigrants from the provinces of Luzon and the Visayas who arrived in the United States before World War II. Seafood, rice, and/or saba bananas, corn, or camote and vegetables formed the basis of their diets. The poorest of the poor might eat only rice, bagoong, and/or salt. The hunger and pov- erty the writer Carlos Bulosan experienced and witnessed in his province of Pangasinan in the 1910s and 1920s haunted his memories. In the first part of his 1946 novel, America Is in the Heart, Carlos accompanies his mother to the market, where she traded her bagoong for rice, beans, and the rare chicken and eggs in neighboring villages.16 A starving woman approaches them and asks to dip her cracked, dry hands in their jar of bagoong. What happened next shocked and humbled Carlos:
The woman . . . ran into her house and came back with a small earthen bowl half-filled with water. Quickly she put her hands into my mother’s can of salted fish, and taking them out as quickly, she washed them in her bowl of clean water. There was agony in her face. When the water had reached the deepest recesses of the cracks in her hands, the woman looked at me with forgiving eyes. Suddenly
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she lifted the bowl to her mouth and drank hungrily of the water where she had washed her hands that had been smeared with salted fish. When it was empty she scraped the sediment in the bottom of the bowl with her forefinger; then she rushed into her hut to look for rice.17
Whether fictionalized or drawn directly from Bulosan’s own experiences, the story illustrates the horrors of provincial poverty and hunger that early immi- grants yearned to escape.
Bulosan was one of the thousands of lower-middle-class pre–World War II emigrants from families with small landholdings who relied on subsis- tence-level farming of rice and vegetables, bartering, fishing, hunting, and gathering. They lived in the densely populated provinces of Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, Pangasinan, Tarlac, and La Union and on the islands of Panay and Cebu, which had almost five hundred residents per square mile but whose land- holdings averaged only about an acre.18 American colonial rule led to massive dislocations in the provinces as the local economies shifted from subsistence farming to export-oriented agriculture. Because the soil of the Ilocos region in Luzon lacks the fertile richness of the rice and coconut-growing lands directly to its south, those who managed to eat three times a day and owned a little bit of land considered themselves fortunate. One immigrant recalled that his family survived by trading with fishermen the bananas, rice, corn, and sweet potatoes that their tenant farmers shared with them. “So there’s no exchange of money,” he said. “It was only a matter of exchanging fish for a staple food so that everyone could live. This was the way we lived in that small village . . . a beautiful thing, yeah.”19
For Filipinas/os in the province, a diet of fish, rice, and vegetables was not monotonous and tiresome; only hunger was unbearable. True hardship meant having no food at all. “We were lucky in that we managed to eat three times a day,” recalled my lolo Ambo of his turn-of-the-century childhood in Numan- cia, Capiz province (later renamed Aklan province). There were no special family meals or celebrations.20 “We always have lots of fish,” said Camila Labor Carido of her childhood in Hinundayan, Leyte. “But we never complain, ‘How come fish all the time?’”21 For breakfast, they ate hot rolls such as pan de sal from the town baker. For lunch, Camila was sent to the market (palengke) for fresh ginamus (salted and fermented fish or shrimp paste) to be eaten with rice and vegetables. “Fish all the time, and maybe in a blue moon, chicken,” she said. Every night, she pounded rice clean for the next day.22
At Christmastime and fiestas, the wealthier landowners and the mid- dle class shared their bounty with their tenant farmers and less fortunate
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neighbors. This was when the poor could eat fiesta food and holiday desserts, such as sweet rice steamed in banana leaves, rice cakes, and drink hot choco- late. “Christmas was the most beautiful thing in my life back home because of all the goodies like suman and rice cake,” remembered one Stockton old-timer: “It didn’t matter how poor you were, they always prepared something for that occasion because it was special for us. . . . When we finished our meal, some- one would give us coffee—real coffee, and then some chocolate, pure chocolate from the cocoa tree.”23
Crop failures, typhoons, and droughts were disastrous for the provincial poor surviving on subsistence farming. A 1904 drought killed the crops of the family of Alberta Alcoy Asis of Carcar, Cebu, whose father farmed a few acres of sugarcane, corn, and vegetables like sitaw (long beans), langka (jack- fruit), ube (purple yam), and munggo (mung beans). Her father’s death in 1908 was catastrophic. “I’m very poor,” she remembered. “My dad left the five acres of land to us. But we cannot plant something because we are small yet. We are seven brothers and sisters.” In Cebu City, Alberta’s mother encountered a recruiter for the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association. Within weeks, the fam- ily left to work in the sugar plantations in Hawai‘i, where work was plentiful but grueling.24 Families like the Alcoys and thousands of other Ilocanas/os and Visayans responded to the burdens of population pressure, colonialism, land loss, and poverty with massive emigration.25