This special issue of Amerasia Journal on labor and capital comes as two significant milestones in the history of Asian America are being commemorated: the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, with its dependence on Chinese labor, and the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Asian American studies in U.S. universities. Guest edited by Gordon Chang of Stanford University, the issue is informed by perspectives that suggest implicitly how these landmark events can be thought to intersect.
The essays collected here trace the forms of labor that Asians supplied in the Americas during a period shaped by U.S. imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Evelyn Hu-DeHart delivers a trenchant consideration on whether the exploitation of Chinese coolies brought to work in Cuba was a case of slavery by another name or the beginnings of the transition to free labor on the island. Her rigorously documented study is matched by Tao Goffe’s speculative rendering of the lives of coolies conscripted to mine guano in Peru and the Caribbean, exploring how Asians transformed the geography of the Americas through their work. These essays can be read alongside Adrian De Leon’s vivid account of the history and life stories of Filipino migrant farmworkers—sakadas—imported by Hawaiian sugar plantations. Richly detailed essays by Calvin Cheung-Miaw and Roland Hsu, and Gordon Chang, respectively, recast the familiar history of how the Chinese built the transcontinental railway in the American West. Respectively, these two essays offer insights into the lives of Chinese in California and their complicated relationships with whites who relied on their labor and economic activity even as they isolated and scapegoated them.
We are proud to announce that “Labor and Capital” is the first issue to be published under a new partnership between Amerasia Journal and Routledge. Beginning with this issue, Routledge will be publishing, distributing, and marketing the journal, while the Amerasia Journal staff will continue to manage editorial operations. Visit Routledge’s Amerasia Journal website for submission instructions, subscription information, and a complete digital archive at: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ramj20/current. We are looking forward to working with Routledge to broaden our readership and to expand the scope and influence of Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, Amerasia Journal’s continuing objective since 1971.
Abstracts:
Chinese Contract Labor in the Wake of the Abolition of Slavery in the Americas: A New Form of Slavery or Transition to Free Labor in the Case of Cuba?
Evelyn Hu-DeHart (Brown University)
Using Cuban archival material (including many documents acquired by private U.S. collectors), this article examines the lives of Chinese contract laborers in Cuba—“coolies”—in the second half of the nineteenth century after they completed the original eight-year contract and subsequent shorter forced re-contracts. The essay moves the argument beyond Chinese coolies simply replicating or prolonging slavery on Cuban plantations to glimpse the beginning of the transition from slave to free labor.
“Guano in Their Destiny”: Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture
Tao Leigh Goffe (Cornell University)
To the ways fertilizer has been employed as an extended metaphor of racial extraction and mourning in U.S. and British literary thought by Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Jackson, and Ian Fleming, I juxtapose archival traces of racial indenture across the Americas that gesture to the exploitations of the nineteenth-century global guano trade. The phosphate-rich droppings of seabirds, guano is refuse that is embedded with a poetics of refusal. Assembling fragments of ship logs, landscape photographs, novels, and knickknacks to compose a variegated archive, I attend to the contours of colonial historiography and the erosion of Chinese labor from the landscape of the Americas. Using the framework of the archipelagic turn, I focus on how Chinese indenture in the Caribbean and Latin America decontinentalizes the circuits of labor and capital in the Western hemisphere. In the 1860s the ecologies of relation between Asian indenture interlocked with black emancipation in a pivotal moment, fueling the notion of “free-market” capitalism. Examining the remains of the Chinese presence in colonial era contracts, I contend with the materiality of how Chinese bones are literally and figuratively calcified in the Caribbean archipelago and the geology of the Americas in a process of transformation I call racial sedimentation. Through an excremental logic of accretion and accumulation, a mosaic of lives becomes part of the histories and bodies sedimented in the geologies of the hemisphere that critically interrogates the boundary between human and nonhuman, freedom and unfreedom.
Sugarcane Sakadas: The Corporate Production of the Filipino on a Hawai‘i Plantation
Adrian De Leon (University of Southern California)
This 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.
Before the “Truckee Method”: Race, Space, and Capital in Truckee’s Chinese Community, 1870–1880
Calvin Cheung-Miaw and Roland Hsu (Stanford University)
Chinese from the town by boycotting their employers. Before the “Truckee Method” of expulsion was implemented, however, Truckee’s Chinatown was first isolated from the rest of the town and then physically relocated. This article explores how boundaries between “Chinese space” and “white space” were constructed during this period, as fears that Chinese buildings were especially flammable became the basis for the belief that it was necessary to isolate “Chinese space” from “white space.” Although white employers of Chinese workers are often depicted as opposing anti-Chinese racism, we argue that white employers played a crucial role in the process of isolating and relocating Chinatown, drawing on their status and financial resources to determine where Chinese could live, work, and own property in Truckee.
The Chinese and the Stanfords: Nineteenth-Century America’s Fraught Relationship with the China Men
Gordon H. Chang (Stanford University)
This essay explores nineteenth-century America’s complicated and often contradictory relationship with the Chinese who were brought to the American West as labor. In particular, the tensions between the political positions and personal experiences of Leland Stanford – railroad magnate, California governor, and founder of Stanford University – reflect the vexed attitudes encountered by the Chinese as they helped build the United States in the nineteenth century. Citing public discourse of the period on the presence of the Chinese in America, along with Stanford’s varied views on it, the essay describes how Stanford’s own awareness of the significant contributions of Chinese labor was at odds with the politically expedient anti-Chinese rhetoric he often espoused. In addition, the perspectives of Chinese workers employed by the Stanfords are detailed here, representing their agency as social subjects.
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