THIS BOOK seeks to demonstrate that the working lives of Asian immigrants and their children in the canned-salmon industry are at the center of the history of the Pacific Northwest and the American West. I Along with a growing number of historical studies that reassess entrenched ideas about nonwhite ethnic peoples as peripheral to this nation’s history, it challenges the notions of nineteenth- and twentieth- century immigration as solely a trans-Atlantic phenomenon and of the era’s industrial developments as confined to the belt stretching from Boston and New York to Chicago.Organizing Asian American Laburfocuses on the roles that...

ANKLE DEEP in the fish gurry, his hands, arms, and front smeared red by the blood and viscera of salmon, twenty-year-old Ah Shing stood on the canning “line,” perhaps before a waist-high filling table stuffing salmon into one- and two-pound tins for ten, twelve, sixteen, and more hours at a stretch. In 1870 such a sight was unusual; Ah Shing and fourteen of his countrymen were the first Chinese to work in a salmon cannery. George Hume had hired a dozen Chinese for positions in the canning line, plus two as tinsmiths and one as a cook, to supplant a...

IN THE LAST quarter of the nineteenth century, the canned-salmon industry gained increasing attention as an important regional enterprise. Local papers regularly reported the size of the fish runs, the establislunent of new plants, and the use of new machinery. Area boosters also treated visiting journalists from across the nation and around the world to tours of the canneries to extol the virtues of the industry and the resource-rich Pacific Northwest. Yet despite the extensive press coverage, Chinese workers appear only in passing as colorful figures in the backdrop of those stories. “At nearly every cannery on the Columbia River,”...

DURING THE winter of 1909–1910, the owners of the Columbia River Packers Association (CRPA) investigated the possibility of establishing a cannery at Chignik, Alaska, because, in the words of partowner Samuel Elmore, “Columbia River fish are practically fading away. Competition is growing stronger, profits less.”¹ Elmore cited the consistently plentiful supply of high-quality salmon that ran for a comparatively long period as Chignik’s foremost advantage over the Columbia River as well as other Alaska locations. To that line of argument he added: Companies used traps extensively in the area, which put the cost of salmon lower than that bought...

RATHER THAN use Chinese laborers alone to pack salmon into the cans by hand, “we will do nearly as well as the previous years by using filling machines during the heavy part of the run.” So Carl A. Sutter of the Fidalgo Island Packing Company (FIPC) explained to his financial partners in British Columbia on the eve of the 1907 season.¹ He observed that even though “reliable” Chinese demanded higher rates than before and that company managers could “get Rail Road [sic] Chinese contractors at anything we may ask, … to let the contract to such parties [is] certainly out...

IN THE FIRST three decades of the twentieth century, Japanese posed the most significant challenge to Chinese in that segment of the cannery labor market recruited and managed by contractors. At first, Japanese entry into the labor market bolstered Chinese and allowed owners the luxury of a very flexible labor supply. Yet, as they increased in number, acquired a canning acumen, and developed direct ties to canners through coethnic contractors, Japanese chiseled away at the Chinese labor aristocracy. Ethnic competition forced a reconfiguration of the labor market from its earlier two- and three-tiered structure in which workers below Chinese had...

BORN IN 1905 in the Ilocano region of the Philippines, Ponce Torres, along with a group of his schoolmates, emigrated to the United States via Seattle in 1925. Within two weeks of his arrival, Torres had signed on with a contractor recommended to him by townmates who had arrived in Seattle several months earlier. Seattle’s Chinatown, he explained, “was the center of job employment to go to Alaska [because] … the offices of those Japanese, Chinese …, and Filipino contractors” were there. I By the end of the decade, the continual circuit of summer work in Alaska salmon canneries and...

BY THE MID-1930s, the contract system had decayed so much that it provided neither services for workers nor a stable supply of labor for canners. Filipinos, in particular, but also Japanese and Chinese increasingly found no fair ethnic representation through contracting, mirroring the experiences of other ethnic groups during the first four and a half decades of the twentieth century. The precipitous decline in cannery wages during the Great Depression also set workers against contractors, who seemed unable to respond to the needs of their crews. Not only had contractors lost ground with their fellow ethnics, but they also came...

THE 1938 VICTORY for cannery workers seeking an ethnically inclusive union was momentous. Ethnic segregation in the labor market had characterized the industry up to that point, and it had taken no small effort to overcome the divisions. The 1938 election, while bringing the ethnic groups under the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) locals, did little to change the ethnic makeup of the labor market or to smooth over antagonistic relations among the groups in the union. In the season following the election, the Alaska Cannery Workers Union (ACWU) in San Francisco and the Cannery Workers and Fann Laborers Union...

SO WROTE an anonymous poet in the 1915 anthology of Cantonese rhymes,Songs of Gold Mountain(Jinshan ge ji), of one Chinese immigrant’s experience.² In rough, folksy Cantonese, the poet expresses many elements that are at the center of this book. I have argued that Asian immigrant and Asian American men and women met frequent, often “untimely adversity” and “toil[ed] in pain” in the United States. The laborers among them quite literally traversed “ten thousand miles” in their annual work-related migrations. Regarding such travails another writer for the same volume says: “If fate is indeed Heaven’s will, what more can...