Binalonan to honor Carlos Bulosan
BINALONAN – He was not totally forgotten after all. Better late than never.
Finally, a long-overdue and a well-deserved recognition were bestowed on writer and poet Carlos Bulosan, a great son of this town and the Philippines’ pride, 50years after his death.
According to Vice Mayor Myrna Bell Uy, presiding officer of the Sangguniang Bayan the town council recently passed ordinance number 2006-01 declaring September 11 as Carlos S. Bulosan Day in the municipality of Binalonan.
The ordinance, sponsored by Councilor Francis Melvile Tinio, chairman of the Committee on Education and Culture and Committee on Ordinances and Legal Matters, expressed the town’s pride for having Bulosan as its son who was born in barangay Sto. Niño.
An eight-foot marker was erected in his honor in Sto. Niño.
The ordinance listed the outstanding accomplishments of Bulosan making him an icon in the world of arts and literature.
Bulosan was described as a celebrated man of letters who died in the United States.
When he was 17, he left his homeland for the United States where he lived through difficult years of unemployment, illness and dangerous labor-union activities on the farms of California and fish canneries in Alaska.
Initially, Bulosan published books on poetry entitled “Letters from America”, “Voice of Bataan,” a tribute to the soldiers who died in that battle.
President Franklin Roosevelt had commissioned Bulosan to write one of the essays, “Freedom from Want,” in “The Four Freedoms,” a wartime collection that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. He attracted nationwide attention for his Laughter of My Father (1944), a collection of short stories serialized in the New Yorker.
“America Is in the Heart” (1946), considered by many to be his most important work, is a semiautobiographical book describing his boyhood in the Philippines, his journey to America, and the many hardships he encountered as a Filipino and migrant worker in that country.- EVA
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