RACE, CLASS, AND IDENTITY FORMATION AMONG THE PORTUGUESE OF HAWAIʻI 1880–1930

Abstract

This dissertation explores Portuguese race and class formation in Hawai‘i from the first organized and structured immigration in the late nineteenth-century to the early twentieth-century when Joaquim Francisco Freitas published Portuguese Hawaiian Memories. This was a key historical period in the Islands for the Portuguese, but also for other immigrant groups, the haole economic elite, and Native Hawaiians as the sugar industry became a dominant force directly impacting the sociocultural, economic, and political aspects of Island life. Utilizing and examining the works and actions of the Portuguese themselves I show the various ways they coalesced as a people forming a unique identity while also assuming a significant role in the cultural tapestry of the Islands.The Portuguese of Hawai‘i are under-studied and under-researched as a group. More troubling than the lack of scholarly interest is the assumption that extant scholarship and research on the group is sufficient to understand them as a people and their contributions to the unique multicultural fabric of Hawai‘i. Recruited in the late nineteenth-century as white European settlers and to extend the labor force on the plantations, the Portuguese occupied a liminal race and class space in Island society serving as a buffer between the haole economic elite and Asian labor both on and off the plantations. Racial logics active at the turn of the twentieth-century created a hierarchy among haole, Kanaka Maoli, and other groups imported to work the plantations with the Portuguese initially enjoying preferred minority status. This preferred status had race and class determined boundaries which the Portuguese found difficult to overcome. The Portuguese of Hawai‘i formed an unique identity from the tension created by their aspirations and their race and class assignment as a people. Never haole, sometimes white, but always local, the Portuguese have much to teach us about race and class formation in general, but also about how these processes manifested in Hawai‘i in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.