Sugarcane Sakadas: The Corporate Production of the Filipino on a Hawai‘i Plantation

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article traces a genealogy of “Filipino” ethnicity to plantations and labor management from the nineteenth century to 1913. It argues that the Filipino on Hawaiʻi, later known as sakadas, emerged through the labor management techniques of sugar plantations and other state and private collaborators. Financial institutions, such as banks and accounting offices, used ethnicity to manage Ilokano (Northern Philippine lowlands peoples) migrant workers, who enjoyed relatively high mobility by virtue of their American colonial status. These institutions drew upon racial regimes developed through nineteenth-century Spanish agriculture, which generated an inland peasantry through the dispossession of their native lifeways.