Digital Analysis of Ethnicity and Labor on Hawai‘i’s Plantations

Although Hawaiʻi is commonly thought of as a tropical paradise, few understand the plantations that fundamentally altered Hawaiʻi’s landscape, leading to the immigration of hundreds of thousands of workers from Asia and around the world. The ethnic traditions of these workers, like my grandparents and great-grandparents, deeply shaped Hawaiʻi’s local identity. Impacting inequalities and culture, the plantations are a cornerstone of issues of both economic disparity and cultural expression in Hawaiʻi. Despite their influence on the personal histories of many Hawaiʻi residents and Americans, there is currently little general understanding of, or research on, the full cultural impact of the plantations.
As the first digital humanities project on Hawaiʻi’s plantation life, this paper seeks to re-examine this history through an interdisciplinary lens. Academics have argued that the business elites of Hawaiʻi, specifically those who operated sugar plantations, placed their employees in racially segregated housing and labor roles as a means of controlling them. However, this paper suggests that racial stratification was not as rigid as has been asserted in past literature, and it presents methods for further investigating racial structures through digital analysis of archival data. By engaging with three analytic approaches, GIS, logistic regression modeling, and qualitative coding, the paper will explore multidisciplinary methods for analyzing 5,742 Alexander & Baldwin plantation employee records and how they inform understandings of race and ethnicity in labor and housing practices. As the largest known dataset of plantation employee records, the data provide new avenues for revisiting assumptions about race, labor, and housing by enabling large-scale investigation of claims that were previously based on more qualitative evidence. The paper will thus emphasize both the importance of a comprehensive historical and sociological understanding of the populations represented and the digital humanities work that has developed from the raw data. Aligning with this year’s conference theme to examine how labor and racialization have shaped Asian American histories and social systems, this research analyzes how global immigration patterns, and the racial and ethnic hierarchies they produced, shaped plantation life in Hawaiʻi and continue to influence its contemporary social landscape.