ABSTRACT
Carlos Bulosan, the subaltern tribune of the colonized, inflected "America" as a popular Imaginary constituted by the lived experiences of millions who suffered, fought, and died for the freedom and justice of all. Bulosan's life may be conceived of as an epitome of the migrant's agon in a protracted sojourn in the "New World." In the middle of imperialism's breakdown, the Depression of the thirties, Bulosan found himself confronted with problems from which, he thought, he had successfully fled: hunger, poverty, racial apartheid, class violence. Bulosan grasped the structural causes of the widespread poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, and savage wrath of the masses—the unawakened gravediggers of the occupying Leviathan. The "Americanization" of the native is the translation of the dream the youthful Bulosan cherished, a conversion that aims to abolish the commodification of life and so naturalize the alien/stranger in a humanized environment.
