Sugar, Pineapple, and the People Who Were Brought

The first large-scale sugar plantation in Hawaii opened on Kauai in eighteen thirty-five. By eighteen seventy, sugar was the dominant industry. By nineteen hundred, it was the entire economy. The Big Five, the five vertically integrated plantation and shipping conglomerates that controlled the industry, ran the harbors, the banks, the newspapers, and eventually the territorial government. They also had a labor problem.

The Native Hawaiian population had been devastated by disease. There were not enough workers. The solution the planters chose was systematic importation: waves of contract laborers recruited from overseas, starting with Chinese workers in the eighteen fifties, then Japanese workers beginning in eighteen eighty-five under a treaty negotiated between King Kalakaua's government and the Japanese Foreign Ministry, then Portuguese workers from Madeira and the Azores, then Puerto Ricans, then Koreans beginning in nineteen oh three, then Filipinos in large numbers from around nineteen oh six. Each group was recruited when the previous group began organizing for better conditions.

The plantation camp was an instrument of control. Workers of each nationality were housed separately, paid by a wage scale that varied by ethnicity, and managed through a system of lunas, field supervisors who had broad authority over workers' daily lives. It was a system designed to prevent solidarity.

It mostly worked, until it didn't. The labor organizing that culminated in the great nineteen forty-six sugar strike was built by the children of those plantation workers, Nisei Japanese Americans and Filipino Americans and Puerto Rican Americans who had grown up in separate camps and found each other in the union halls of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union. What the planters built as a tool of division became the soil in which a uniquely multicultural labor movement grew.

The demographic reality of modern Hawaii, its mix of Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, and Native Hawaiian ancestry, is not natural diversity. It is the direct inheritance of a plantation labor recruitment system designed to minimize the cost of growing sugar.