Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World by Gregory Rosenthal

Author:Gregory Rosenthal [Rosenthal, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520295063
Goodreads: 36338063
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2018-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

ON THE FARM

Sometime between 1868 and 1870, Henry Nahoa left Sacramento to reside in a boardinghouse in the rural town of Vernon, Sutter County, about twenty-five miles north of the city along the Sacramento River. The 1870 U.S. census recorded “Henry Mahoa,” thirty years old, living in Manneha Kapu’s boardinghouse along with eleven other Hawaiian men. The census listed each man’s occupation—including Nahoa’s—as “fisherman.” They ranged in age from Nahoa, thirty, to Bull Kaawa, sixty. Manneha Kapu, the female boardinghouse owner was also sixty years old, and living alongside her and the twelve male boarders were a few younger relations, three California-born Hawaiian children of undetermined parentage: Hamet Kapu, male, 16; Lipica Kapu, female, 8; and, John Davis, male, 5. The biological parents of these children are not recorded in the census, but it can be assumed that Kapu and her husband were raising the children as their own. Her husband, John, was recorded living next door with four other Hawaiian men on the agricultural estate of the Euro-American Roth family of Pennsylvania. The five Hawaiian men at Roth’s were also listed as “fishermen.” Remarkably, between the Kapus, the twelve Hawaiian men in the boardinghouse, the four other Hawaiian men on the Roth farm, and the three children living with Manneha Kapu, this Hawaiian community at Vernon—twenty-one people in all—comprised nearly 3 percent of the town’s population and was the largest nonurban congregation of Hawaiian migrants then living in the state of California.55

Nahoa was not the only one to move to the farm. By 1870, Hawaiian migrants had scattered from mining camps into jobs and livelihoods, as well as unemployment and homelessness, all across California, from the mountains to the cities to farms. While most Hawaiians still engaged in some form of mining (or at least that was the occupation most frequently recorded in the federal census), the trend in the 1860s was diversification in work and work environments. In the 1860s, more Hawaiian women were living in California than ever before. Some worked as prostitutes, others as domestic servants, but most simply married working men and, according to the census, stayed at home and engaged in unpaid domestic work. Fully 36 percent of all Hawaiian migrants living in California in 1870 were women (up from 11 percent in 1860). One consequence of this change was more and more Hawaiian men in California started families, having given up dreams of returning home with riches to share with their kin. Geographically, this phase of Hawaiian migration to and within California not only saw the spreading out of Hawaiians across a greater assemblage of California counties, but also witnessed a marked exodus away from the traditional mining regions and toward cities and farms.56

In some ways these migration patterns were a reflection of larger economic and ecological transformations in California’s post–Gold Rush trajectory. Historian Andrew Isenberg has argued that Frederick Jackson Turner was wrong when in the 1890s he claimed that the history of the American frontier (i.e., the U.S. West) followed a linear progression from wilderness to agriculture to industrialization.

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