Bulosan, Carlos

Carlos Bulosan was a Filipino-American author, poet, and migrant laborer. Carlos Bulosan was born in the Philippines in 1911. He began working as a day laborer at age 11 after only 3 years of formal schooling. He left home to provide for his own support at age 13. In 1931, at age 17, he came to Seattle, Washington but within 2 days was shanghaied by a local hotel proprietor and sold to an Alaskan fish cannery. At the end of the season he came back to Washington and began work as a migrant farm worker, mostly in Washington and California. During the years 1935-1941, he attempted to organize migrant workers into unions and began to write about their conditions, particularly those of Filipino immigrant workers. He had begun to write in 1936 during a two year stay in a Los Angeles hospital for tuberculosis. He published some poetry in 1936, and short stories in 1938. He continued writing until about the mid-1940s, and wrote very little during the last 10 years of his life. He died in 1956.

From the guide to the Carlos Bulosan papers, 1914-1976, 1948-1956, (University of Washington Libraries Special Collections)