Filipino bodies, lynching, and the language of empire

As a result of the Philippine-American War and their long history of labor migration, Filipinos, the second-largest Asian immigrant population in the United States, figured prominently in the U.S. popular imagination during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 In his autobiography, America Is in the Heart (1946), labor activist and writer Carlos Bulosan chronicles the lives of Filipino farmworkers during the Great Depression. A substantial part of the text is set in California in the 1930s, when an increase in the state's Filipino immigrant population provoked anti-Filipino sentiment and Filipino farmworkers were the subjects of racial violence and discrimination.2 The book depicts this violence in vivid terms, nowhere more graphically than in a scene where three Filipino farmworkers are lynched. The narrator, Carlos, is preparing union materials with two Filipino labor organizers in a restaurant when five white men with guns barge in and force them into a car.