america is not the heart by elaine castillo

He joins Paz in the Bay Area as the resistance movement against Dictator Marcos grows, in fear of political repercussion for his close ties with the Marcoses. Pol, on the other hand, comes from the wealthy, landowning De Vera family.

Paz, not unlike the 7,000 Philippine citizens who leave the country every day, moves abroad in order to provide material support for her family through remittances and a pathway to foreign citizenship. As she moves through this liminal space, Hero struggles to maintain a cohesive sense of self as her fragmented past becomes de- and re-contextualized in the everyday fabric of her new life.Ĭastillo interweaves her characters’ personal stories with the concealed histories of an empire, the United States, and its neo-colony, the Philippines, as well as the subjects that move between them. Caring for Roni becomes Hero’s entry into the Filipinx-American borderlands-an expansive yet often overlooked facet of American culture.

She moves in with her uncle, Pol De Vera, a blue-blooded surgeon turned security guard, his wife, Paz, an immigrant nurse responsible for her family’s survival and their American-born daughter, Roni, a dark-skinned, eczema-ridden nine-year-old. The protagonist, Hero De Vera, is a former communist rebel faced with yet another new life-this time, in Milpitas, California. Elaine Castillo’s debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, tells the captivating story of a Filipinx family living abroad in the shadow of the Philippines’ dictatorial Marcos regime.

America is not the heart by elaine castillo