History Literature / AmericaIsNotTheHeart

* DisabledLoveInterest:
** In a manner of speaking. Paz lost most of her upper teeth and wears dentures, and has a mild case of Bell's palsy, but that clearly hasn't been a deterrent to Pol's affections even after he inevitably learns about it.
** Paz' older sister Carmen is a more explicit example, with half her face stricken by Bell's palsy (which unlike Paz she hasn't been able to keep in check), but that somehow makes her as a whole even more attractive, like her possible celebrity namesake, TheFifties movie star Carmen Rosales.
** Hero herself, with her broken hands, though she doesn't seem to be described as a terribly standout looker.

* MultiEthnicName: Not surprising among Filipino characters, many of whose full names source from Spanish, Chinese, various Philippine languages, and generic English or Western sources, in whatever order, all in the same person: Rosalyn Cabugao (first name Anglo/Western, last name Ilocano), for example. The original Geronima de Vera (for whom Hero and Roni were later named) was born a Chua, meaning she had at least one Spanish given name and a Hokkien Chinese last name.

* EverybodySmokes: Hero's childhood in Vigan, in the Ilocos region; she herself started smoking in her early teens (this would've been from TheSixties to TheSeventies). Doubly so for her uncle Pol's generation: Hamin, Hero's father, can tell various tobacco flavours and started smoking as a ''grade-school child''. Naturally, given the Ilocos are deep in tobacco country, historically ground zero for the country's Spanish-colonial tobacco monopoly. (Hero herself has effectively quit by the time she migrates, largely because [[spoiler:cigarette burns on her skin were one of the many torture methods inflicted on her in prison]].)

* CorruptHick: While it's never gone into specific detail whether any of the de Veras are actually politicians or just political operators (except for Hamin, Hero's father, who starts out a Vigan councillor and becomes mayor of a Vigan satellite town in a LandslideElection), as a whole they fit this trope for their jurisdiction of [[GangsterLand Vigan]], acquiring a reputation amongst outsiders as a fearsome warlord clan. Overlaps with FeudalOverlord.

* IllGirl: Not a debilitating case, but Roni has a chronic eczema problem. Hero had it in her youth too. (Hero after prison also counts, as she's very thin and weak upon her release and spends the next several years recuperating—by her migration to California, her hands are still recovering.)

* LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters: It's about huge Filipino extended families and all their friends, who often count as part of the family even if they're not blood relatives. Of course.

** Then there's Hero, who [[DefectorFromDecadence left all her family's wealth and influence behind when she went into the mountains as a rebel]], and winds up living with Pol in California, eventually waitressing at Rosalyn's grandparents' restaurant, and picking up Roni from school.

* MixedRace: The de Vera family, as a whole, originated from a mix of ethnicities fairly typical for their privileged class standing in the Spanish colonial era: Chinese (specifically Hokkien) traders, Spanish landowners, and—still most prominently, though—native, dark-skinned Ilocanos. The foreign mixes aren't that much though, apparently, and of them, even the Chinese is still more stronger or more recent, so that by Pol's generation, he and his brothers pretty much still look native-Ilocano anyway.
** Of the other families, Paz' ancestry also contains considerable Chinese blood, which is how her family ends up still using terms like ''atse'' (a Chinese-derived term for "older sister", from which the ''ate'' used in Tagalog and other mainstream Philippine languages derives).

* WitchDoctor: Grandma Sisang, Paz' mother, and Roni's ''lola'' (grandma), a faith healer. Adela Cabugao, Rosalyn's ''lola'', does the same, and manages to fix up Roni's eczema problem better than the Western skincare medicines she was taking before that.

* MassivelyNumberedSiblings: Pol himself is one of eight children. (There was a ninth, but she died in infancy.) Both Geronimas stand in stark contrast as only children (and outliers in a heavily Catholicised Filipino society where large families are more common and preferred).

* SecondPersonNarration: The "you" in the narrative often refers either to Paz or to Rosalyn.

* MassivelyNumberedSiblings: Pol himself is one of eight children. (There was a ninth, but she died in infancy.)

* GangsterLand: Vigan apparently has a reputation amongst outsiders as overrun by murderous political warlords and their petty-oligarch families; they're not technically criminal organisations, but are seen as just as dangerous. Hero doesn't get where this is coming from until she realises, during her stint in the NPA, that she was part of that warlord class all along, so she never had to fear any of them.

* LiteraryAllusionTitle: To the classic Filipino-American novel, ''America is In the Heart'', by Carlos Bulosan. (As of this writing, that novel is set to come out in the Penguin Classics series by mid-2019, and guess who wrote the foreword—Castillo herself!)

* OnlyChildSyndrome: Roni appears to be the only child of Paz and Pol—a rarity among huge, Catholic Filipino families, the farther back into the past one goes. Hero also appears to have no siblings either.
** MassivelyNumberedSiblings: Just as one example, Pol himself is one of eight children. (There was a ninth, but she died in infancy.)

A 2018 {{Doorstopper}} novel by Filipino-American author Elaine Castillo, and her first novel, ''America is Not the Heart'' is, at … ''heart'', a GenerationalSaga centred around the de Vera family, whose ancestors originally hail from the Ilocos region in the northwest of the Philippine island of Luzon, but whom history's cards send first to the capital in Manila, through sundry hinterlands across the rest of the island, then ultimately to Milpitas in the San Francisco Bay Area—a common rite of passage for Filipino immigrant families in the United States.

* LipstickLesbian: Rosalyn, who deals in actual lipstick (among other things) as a makeup artist working at a salon.

* HighSchoolSweethearts: Hero's first relationship, back in Vigan, was with a boy named Francisco, scion of an oligarch family [[Fiction500 much wealthier than her own]]. This would've been when she was in late high school or just prior to entering university.