Seattle from the Margins

"A rare comparative and relational history of race and migration in the Puget Sound area. Its rigorous examination of Native, Chinese, and Japanese experiences and their relationship to a larger history of racial contestation and displacement is truly significant."—Shelley Lee, author of Claiming the Oriental Gateway: Prewar Seattle and Japanese America

"Imaginatively reveals Seattle's vibrant multi-racial creators—the Indigenous people and Asian migrants—who toiled and struggled in the city's first century and whose forgotten intimacies and legacies expose the sediments of racial segregation.""—Nayan Shah, author of Stranger Intimacy and Contagious Divides

"Asaka asks us to take a fresh look at Seattle to see the migratory workers whose labor helped to build the segregated urban landscape they lived within. Rich with detail and insight, Seattle from the Margins captures the overlapping forces of race, migration, labor, and colonialism in the making of this Pacific hub."—Beth Lew-Williams, author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America

"Seattle has always been a working city, and Megan Asaka's compelling account of labor, race, and migration in and around the Northwest's largest city gives us new ways of seeing and understanding this fact. Caught up in imperial networks, systems of segregation, and the logics of racial capitalism, the workers of Seattle both transformed and were transformed by their encounters with the city and surrounding spaces. A must-read for anyone interested in the region's history or in the intersections between labor and race more generally."—Coll Thrush, author Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place