Ethnic Labor Colonizing the Urban Frontier: Labor's Political Incorporation on the 19th Century West Coast

• In Event: Comparative-Historical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Comparative-Historical Roundtable 1

Abstract

This chapter examines the role of ethnic organizations in the urban development of the West Coast, focusing on the formation of ethnic labor organizations and their impact on political development. The literature on the political incorporation of labor in the U.S. has focused on the national level and often overlooks racial and colonial dynamics. In this chapter I show that colonization and ethnic organizing was central to how San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles each institutionalized a different role for labor in city politics in the 19th century. In each city, the demands of colonization required recruitment of immigrant labor through immigrant and ethnic organizations. However, each city’s specific economic colonial goals put the onus for this recruitment on a different entity (large corporations, government, small producers, or civil society). Additionally, co-ethnic and inter-ethnic organizations responded to these needs and their own community’s goals by creating different class-based solidarities in each city—working-class, cross-class, or upper-class solidarities. Together, the goals of colonization and the actions of ethnic organizers led to four different forms of labor integration into politics: working-class parties in San Francisco, direct democracy in Portland, bureaucratic offices in Seattle, and no voice for labor in Los Angeles. This comparative history explains subnational differences of the political incorporation of labor while highlighting the centrality of colonization, race, ethnicity, and immigration to early labor organizing in the U.S.

Author

• Simon Yamawaki Shachter, University of Connecticut