Saturday, June 20, 1998
On a Monday morning in June 1997, I received a phone call from the White House. The aide said that the president wanted me to attend a meeting to help him brainstorm ideas for his major speech on race and his initiative for the national dialogue on race. She explained that Clinton wanted to take the discourse on race "beyond black and white."
"So your presence as an Asian- American scholar would be very important."
At the meeting, I described the diversity of the American population in the 21st century when whites would become a minority group, like African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders. "We will all be minorities," I said.
However, I did not have the opportunity to point out to the president that this future had already arrived in Hawaii more than 100 years ago.
What can we learn from Hawaii's history that we can share with the rest of the nation?
As a child, I grew up in Palolo Valley, where my neighbors were Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian and Portuguese. Our diversity had not been explained in school: Why were there so many different peoples, speaking different languages and sharing different cultures, living together?
Even after I had received a Ph.D. in American history, I still had not learned the answer.
Then, 20 years ago, while I was on sabbatical in Hawaii, my Uncle Richard asked me in mellifluous pidgin English: "Hey, why you no go write a book about us, huh?" And I replied: "Why not?" This led me down the path of Hawaii's past.
Our society's diversity was by design. As planters began to develop the sugar economy in the late 19th century, they pursued a plan: "Get labor first, and capital will follow."
For supplies, they sent requisitions to the mercantile houses in Honolulu. In a letter to a plantation manager, July 2, 1890, Theo. Davies Co. acknowledged receipt for:
bonemealWhile they placed orders for men and materials, planters were also conscious of the nationalities of their laborers. They systematically developed a diverse labor force in order to promote inter-ethnic divisiveness. Managers had devised a policy: "Keep a variety of laborers, that is different nationalities, and thus prevent any concerted action in case of strikes, for there are few, if any, cases of Japs, Chinese, and Portuguese entering into a strike as a unit."
canvas
Japanese laborers
macaroni
ChinamanThese workers found themselves in a world of regimented labor. "All the workers on a plantation in all their tongues and kindreds, rolled out before the break of day," reported a visitor. In front of the mill, they were lined up, shouldering their hoes, and were organized into gangs. Each gang was supervised by "a luna, or overseer, almost always a white man."
Then, the laborers were marched to the fields. "We worked like machines," one of them complained. Harvesting cane was exhausting. Twelve feet tall, the cane seemed like a formidable forest, and the workers resembled miniature soldiers as they cut the stalks.
Fighting back against the cane, workers also refused to be intimidated by management. Contrary to the stereotype of Asians as quiet and passive, they made choices and acted to improve their conditions.
Denied the right to become citizens because the 1790 Naturalization Law had restricted eligibility only to "whites," Japanese laborers viewed the workplace as the site for political struggle.
Their first major strike took place in 1909 when the Japanese constituted 70 percent of the workforce. The strikers demanded equal pay for equal work -- the same wage paid to Puerto Ricans and Portuguese. "It is not the color of his skin or hair, or the language he speaks, or manners and customs that grow cane in the field," the strikers declared. "It is labor that grows cane."
Their strike statement revealed a choice these immigrant workers had made. "We have decided to permanently settle here and to unite our destiny with that of Hawaii."
Fair wages, they argued, would enable them to enter "a thriving and contented middle-class -- the realization of the high ideal of Americanism."
But the planters crushed the strike and then began importing Filipino laborers in a divide-and-rule strategy. By 1920, the Japanese workers represented only 44 percent of the labor force, and the Filipinos 30 percent.Pitted against each other, the two groups engaged in rivalry and conflict, but they came to recognize their need for inter-ethnic solidarity.
In 1920, the Japanese and Filipino laborers went out on strike together. The Filipinos initiated the action when 3,000 of them stopped working. Japanese newspapers urged unity: Between Filipinos and Japanese, there should be "no barriers of nationality, race, or color."
Although the strikers were defeated, they had displayed the power of inter-group cooperation.
Moreover, the strike represented the political expression of a cultural transformation. Coming from different countries, the immigrants had been transplanting their customs and traditions to the islands.
In the plantation camps, families were sharing their various ethnic foods. A Portuguese woman remembered how her mother made gifts of "little buns for the children in the camp. The Japanese families gave us sushi and the Hawaiians gave us fish. Everybody took their own lunches to school, and they traded their foods with one another."
Initially, immigrant laborers spoke only their native tongues. But gradually a common language emerged on the plantations. The managers wanted their workers to be taught a functional spoken English so they could give commands to their multi-lingual work force.
"By this," explained a planter, "we do not mean the English of Shakespeare but the terms used in everyday plantation life. A great many of the small troubles arise from the imperfect understanding between overseers and laborers."
Over the years, a plantation dialect developed called "pidgin English" -- a basic English that incorporated Hawaiian, Japanese, Portuguese and Chinese phrases as well as the rhythms and intonations of these languages. Though it had begun as "the language of command," this hybrid language with its luxuriant cadences and lyrical sounds became the language of the community.
The immigrant workers knew they belonged to America. After all, they had transformed the islands into a profitable sugar economy.
"When we first came to Hawaii," the 1920 strikers boasted, "these islands were covered with ohia forests, guava fields and areas of wild grass. Day and night did we work, cutting trees and burning grass, clearing lands and cultivating fields until we made the plantations what they are today."
They also asked their adopted country to live up to its high ideals. At their 1920 strike rallies in Aala Park, Japanese and Filipinos waved American flags and carried a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. They had learned, perhaps from their children attending public schools, about the Gettysburg Address with its proclamation that this nation had been founded and "dedicated" to the "proposition" of equality.
Embedded in Hawaii's history can be found the sources of its ethnic diversity and tensions as well as the sources of the ties that have bound different peoples together.
In the coming century, the rest of the nation will be like Hawaii -- a society of expanding ethnic diversity. Will we be able to work it out, paraphrasing Rodney King, to get along?
Earlier this was the question immigrant plantation workers had to face as they made choices for their identities, cultures, and politics. Across America in the approaching decades, we, too, will have choices to make. Hopefully, we will be guided by an informed understanding of our country's history, particularly Hawaii's plantation past.
Diversity talk
What: Free presentation by Ronald Takaki, Hawaii-born professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ronald Takaki, a professor in the Ethnic Studies
Department at the University of California, Berkeley, is author of "Pau Hana:
Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii" and "A Different Mirror:
A History of Multicultural America."
