Hawai’i’s Plantation Village

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

To look at, Hawai’i is the perfect place for leisure – golden sands kissed by aquamarine waves, lush mountains and vivid tropical vegetation. But for immigrant sugar plantation laborers a century ago, it was a place of daily toil, poverty and isolation from home and family.

Back then, sugar was king and so lucrative that plantation owners imported cheap labor from around the world to build the work force they needed. Today, the cane fields are gone; labor having been priced out of the global market. The industry also suffered diminished demand as high-fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in soft drinks. Sugar plantations began to close in the 1970s and in 1995 the last operation was shuttered. Of what was a way of life for thousands of laborers, only an open-air ethnographic museum remains.

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