Sakura of DOOM

The race/power/culture axes in Hawai'i are just particularly complicated and twisted around over time, too. It sounds like this book you're mentioning (and I'd love to hear more about it!) is focusing on the plantation era, which saw succeeding waves of immigration the Philippenes, Japan, China, Portugal, etc. to fill the sugar industry's need for cheap agricultural labor. The earliest labor unions there were organized on ethnic lines, and while there were occasional earlier glimmers of solidarity between the two largest ones, there wasn't really a truly unified multiethnic agri union until the mid-40s; meanwhile politically the islands were still essentially dominated by the wealthy minority of white plantation owners, a dominance that went back to the annexation era and lasted pretty much through statehood, which then saw a predominantly second-gen Japanese-American Democratic party dominating local politics, well, pretty much into the 1990s when that generation was dying off. And there's still all sorts of lingering tensions and weirdnesses that can be traced back to all this earlier stuff, all sorts of undercurrents of inter-group resentment where you've got one group dominating the local government and another dominating some of the labor unions etc. and all the usual perceptions of favorable treatment...plus intragroup tensions between those whose families have been in the islands for a few generations and "localized" versus the FOAB newer immigrants, or even the cultural tensions between Hawai'i-born and mainland-US-born folks of the same ethnic group. Even ideas about whiteness have odd twists to it that can be traced back to the plantation era: I remember the last time a major federal census came around there was grumbling about the categorizations used from some local Portuguese, because they didn't consider themselves "white" -- that was a category for the oldtime plantation bigshots, or the rich mainlanders who picked up pricey condos downtown, or the tourists on the beach at Waikiki, it didn't seem to fit folks who'd been lumped in as "local" along with the various Asian and Pacific Island groups they'd worked alongside with in the cane fields back in the day...

_{(Um, hi, delurk with incoherent babble much? I just found your journal by way of my recent obsessive descent into Saiyuki fandom, only to find all your more personal material on Third Culture Kid issues all sorts of RESONANT LIKE WHOA. Which is all to say sorry for the random intrusion, and thank you for all your thoughtful posts!)}