Not Yet Free: The Tired and The Poor

~7 min read

Note 02/26/2026: Once again this is an essay I wrote for the class from this essay. As I said in the other one, consider that this is academic writing and specific to the sources I used. I don’t have any particular attraction to this story, but I figured there’s no harm in posting it here vs letting it rot in my google drive, especially since it was written genuinely.

The United States is referred to by some as the “Nation of Immigrants”, and this sentiment pervades through the cultural identity of American diversity, values, language, and culture. America was built on the backs of immigrants from Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and more who arrived to settle into a new life for themselves and their future generations. Immigrants have not always been accepted however, nor been given equal opportunities to forge new lives; Where there has been immigration there has also been discrimination, racism, and hate. This is further exacerbated during times of hardship, such as during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, where all manner of peoples worldwide struggled to survive and thrive. In a time where people should be most supportive of each other, they are instead drawn to hate and resentment, especially against outsiders who had little support in new lands where they were not always welcome. Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan examined this period of time in his story, “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow” (1949). Set during the Great Depression, the story revolves around the efforts of a young Filipino Migrant worker seeking to educate himself with the help of a young white teacher, while confronting brutal racism in a small rural California town. Bulosan explores personal resistance against an empire (America) through the narrator’s pursuit of education, cross-racial solidarity between Filipino laborers and their white teacher, and the violent racial backlash that seeks to destroy both forms of resistance.

From the onset of the story the narrator—a young Filipino migrant newly arrived in America—possesses a strong desire to educate himself. This desire is not only present but is actively portrayed as a path towards betterment and away from a life perceived to be stagnant. The story shows the prospects of a laborer to be static and without the expectation of growth. Talking about the older migrant workers that accompany the narrator, Bulosan writes, “They seemed a bunch of contented workers, but they were actually restless and had no plans for the future” (Bulosan 1). Here the author portrays the life of the older men as stagnant. They are employed and surviving, but they have little prospects besides working and occasionally playing poker. This is not due to a laziness to work—of which their efforts are never criticized—but to the lack of compensation which their work provides. The narrator finds an interest in the schoolteacher and schoolchildren, seeing in them a familiarity with his home as well a desire for education. When the teacher visits the narrator after one of his visits to the school, she asks, “Would you like to do some reading under me?”, to which he responds, “I’d love to ma’am” (Bulosan 2). Here the narrator professes his first direct desire for learning. This is in direct resistance to his role as a laborer, an unskilled, expendable place in society that he is subjected to by the American system. His attempts to read and learn push against this role assigned to him. It shows a persistence to grow and disrupt a society that would rather maintain a given racial and class hierarchy.

The aspirations of the narrator to learn are substantiated by the efforts of the schoolteacher who help him and his fellow laborers study. The school teacher is described as a 25 year old white woman who is college educated, coming from a different racial and social class of the Filipino migrant workers. Many white individuals during this time propagated the systems which kept such migrants poor and uneducated, allowing them to reap the rewards of laborers and lower class individuals without offering proper growth or compensation. This discrepancy in her behavior against what was typical for the time could come from her upbringing. The author writes, “She was born in a little town somewhere in the Northwest. She had come from a poor family and supported herself through college” (Bulosan 3). Being born to a less fortunate family would offer her perspective towards the effects of financial hardship, even before the Depression. Additionally, her attainment of education despite her upbringing solidifies the value of education to empower others. It also reinforces learning as a key to breaking social barriers and resisting established social roles. Her motivations are further solidified when she says, “I will go on teaching people like you to understand things as long as the grass shall grow.” (Bulosan 5). The schoolteacher shows consistent effort to educate the migrants throughout the story, even in the face of discrimination against herself and her students. She teaches them in their bunks, in the school, and finally her own home before the resistance against them turns violent (Bulosan 3-4). Her staunch commitment shows not just defiance of social pressure, but a personal belief in the value of education for dignity and transformation. Bulosan not only shows that empowerment exists across social barriers in direct opposition to established systems, but that such solidarity is rooted in shared experiences of hardship and marginalization.

Resistance is always done in opposition to an active force, in this case the social and racial hierarchies of Depression-Era America. Bulosan portrays these forces as enforced by individuals seeking to actively suppress marginalized people and preserve the existing social order. The first mention of this force is abstract. “She came to tell us that some organization in town had questioned her coming to our bunkhouse. She told us to go to the schoolhouse when our work was done” (Bulosan 3). Here it is only some “organization” which resists the schoolteacher’s efforts to teach the boys. The opposition is indirect (to the students at least) and not properly understood. The author writes, “I was too newly arrived from the islands… to have learned the taboos of the mainland, to have seen the American doors shut against us” (Bulosan 3). The narrator here is innocent about the discrimination and confused by its purpose. He is not innocent as a matter of ignorance or intelligence, but in his unfamiliarity with a society structured to deny his worth. Later, the boys are forced to relocate once again for teaching. “Then Miss O’Reilly told us she was forbidden by the school board to use the building at night. The directive was for us, of course” (Bulosan 4). Finally, the narrator begins to recognize that these restrictions are not abstract, but actions deliberately targeted at him and those like him. This paints a more detailed image of the systems of exclusion. This abuse finally culminates in direct violence, with the narrator being kidnapped, beaten, and run over by a car. This brutal act is followed by a written threat delivered to the bunkhouse. Miss O’Reilly’s efforts in the face of resistance are finally stamped out. (Bulosan 4). The severity of these actions against innocent and modest attempts at empowerment underscore the investment of American society in maintaining its hierarchies. With such hate and resentment, even something as simple as teaching history can be seen as a dangerous disruption to the status quo.

Carlos Bulosan’s “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow” is a story about migrants trying to exist in depression-era America. It tells the story of an individual trying to better himself through education and the efforts of others to support him and his peers. His story shows that even small acts of improvement and solidarity can be perceived as a threat to a society built on exclusion. Through the narrator’s pursuit of knowledge, cross-cultural solidarity, and the violent responses these manifest, Bulosan illustrates how personal resistance emerges and how oppressive systems react to preserve their power and destroy resistance.

Works Cited

Bulosan, Carlos. “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow.” Common Ground, Summer 1949, pp. 38–43.