Seattle was built by poor and minoritized seasonal workers. Well into the early 20th century, it was Coast Salish groups, Chinese immigrants, single white men, Japanese people, Filipino families, and Black workers who kept the regionâs hops farms, sawmills, laundries, canneries, and lumber yards running; between stints, they developed racially integrated worker communities in strictly circumscribed and annexed pockets of the city south of whatâs now Yesler Way. While simultaneously depending on and exploiting these workers, the white ruling class erected a draconian scaffold of ordinances and rules to surveil, punish, and shape nonwhite worker districts to advance ruling-class aims, oftentimes razing workersâ neighborhoods altogether to make way for whiter and wealthier places and people.
Dr. Megan Asaka, who grew up in Seattle and is Assistant Professor of History at UC Riverside, spent 15 years tracing the history of these racialized and largely transient worker populations between the mid-1800s and early 1900s. She presents her research in Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City. Weaving together fire department reports, building records, public health ordinances, oral histories, and other overlooked archival sources, Asaka deftly foregrounds the experiences of transient and surveilled workers to tell the story of Seattleâs intercultural commerce and communities. Asakaâs tour de force offers lessons and strategies for local mobilization today; Seattle from the Margins proves the white-supremacist origins of policing practices that continue to oppress the city, showcasing, notably, how anti-vagrancy laws in Seattle explicitly find their roots in settler-government efforts to limit the movement of Indigenous women.Â
In an interview with The Stranger, Asaka describes the clash between personal family history and public scholarship that compelled her to write the book, makes a case for approaching marginalized histories through built spaces, and outlines how Seattle from the Margins can inform public engagement with contemporary local issues.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Letâs start by discussing your impetus for writing the book, especially the dissonance you describe between your own personal experiences growing up in Seattle as compared to the predominantly white or community-specific scholarship about Seattle that you encountered.
My great-grandfather immigrated from Japan in the early 20th century and came to Seattle, so my roots go pretty far back in Seattle history. I come from a Japanese-American family, and my family experienced some of the things I talked about in the book: segregation, exclusion, denial, citizenship, but also mass removal and incarceration during World War II.Â
And then, for me, the more profound connection to that history was also when my family returned from camp and literally returned to nothingâeverything was gone, the community was shattered, and people in Seattle didn't want them back. So that's the Seattle that I grew up knowing about through my family history. My grandmother was very open about her experiences, so it wasn't hidden in any way for me.Â
I had that knowledge of Seattle history that never really was reflected in the scholarship. When I was growing up, museum exhibits, journal articles, newspaper articlesâall of these different outlets about Seattleâwere from very much a white perspective, and uncritically so, I think, and very much celebrating the settlers and the idea that Seattle possessed an exceptional and unique history that was more open-minded and progressive than other cities, especially when it came to race. It was that distance between those two narratives that really interested me, frustrated me, and motivated me to tell a different kind of Seattle history. I didn't set out to become a historian, or even a writer, but that's just the path that I followed.Â
You buck against that kind of history through the lens of the built environment. What did it take to tell such a textured history through physical spaces?
Iâve always been interested in that spatial dimension, because it helps me make sense of the past and really complicated histories if it's grounded in a particular place. That was always something that really attracted me, even as a college student. But also I highlighted the built environment out of necessity, because there were so few records available about migratory and transient populations, so the built environment was a way to tell a social history of people really missing in the scholarship, but to do it in a way that highlighted the social worlds and different forms of intimacies that were formed in these specific places.Â
I focus on things like so-called âslum districts.â So Profanity Hill is one neighborhood that I focus on that was deemed a slum, but I questioned what a slum is: There is no objective definition, and officials use it for their own purposes when they want to clear out a particular neighborhood. I talk a lot about hotels and lodging houses as being really important economically for the city, because they housed a lot of migratory workers who are moving in and out. I used a lot of building records, fire department records, and a lot of photographs of labor camps to reconstruct not only the economic function of these spaces but also the worlds contained within.Â
And this connects to present-day issues: I make a very explicit argument in the book about the intentional erasure of these hotels and labor camps and so-called âslum districtsâ in the â30s and â40s. Itâs the erasure of the inhabitants in the historical memory of the city. So there's a connection, in my opinion, between erasure of the landscape and erasure of historical memory. What are the physical traces? There are so few.Â
There are many ephemeral and highly policed sites that exist or have recently existed in Seattle like CHOP/CHAZ as well as encampments. I'm wondering what sort of throughlines you've seen in terms of the ordinances or punitive measures that exist from the era that you study that are still being applied today.Â
Sites like Profanity Hill, shantytowns like Hooverville, and labor camps were created in some ways as spaces to contain people that the city relied upon, but did not want to deal with. A lot of times, segregation emerges out of this tension. We see vagrancy laws start to emerge in the 1860s. So Seattle was officially founded in 1853, but incorporated as a city in the 1860s, and when it incorporated as a city, one of the first ordinances that was passed was about vagrancy and defined a vagrant, actually, as a Native American woman who was walking around in public after 9 pm. That was directly tied to settlers trying to establish a residence district, this permanent city of white families, and then rendering indigenous people as outsiders in their own lands. Vagrancy grew out of that origin to then encompass other âthreateningâ populations, including white male migrants and Chinese men.Â
There are all these ways that we see municipal policy and laws being used by different agencies in the city, not just the policeâthe fire department against Japanese hotels, the building department, public health officialsâto target certain people at certain moments, and then to create a narrative that they are somehow dangerous to public safety.Â
Thereâs a bias, and not just for historians, that people who move in and out of the city or don't have a temporary presence in the city are somehow unimportant, or they don't have a ârealâ connection to Seattle, or that theyâre dangerous or threatening to the social order. That's the story I also tell in my book: a cautionary tale of how this is what happened in the past, and it's not disconnected from the present, and how those fears around who is seen as worthy of inclusion into urban society are so wrapped up in race and gender and class.
A lens you use to interpret multiracial neighborhoods is the perceived racialized threat of the single white man. Iâd love to hear more about that racialization as it relates to two things. First: To what extent was it a heterosexual panicâlike, âHey, there are a bunch of single guys, what are they doing together?â Second: Were they racialized given their greater tendency to form labor solidarity with minoritized workers?
It's important to tease out which men were threatening at which moment. Chinese men, for example, were also threatening but at an earlier moment in time in the late 19th century. They were seen first of all as a possible sexual threat to white women before the Chinese Exclusion Act, and it became part of the discourse around passing immigration restrictions. Chinese men lived in these bachelor communities and did work that was seen as feminizedâworking as domestic servants or in laundries or as cooks, because thatâs the only work that was available to themâand that was a threat but in a different kind of way, and was used to make a claim that they were unfit for inclusion into US society, and that they possessed a âdeviantâ sexuality that made them undesirable citizens.Â
Something that I don't get into as much is there was also this concern about white male migrants in the American West, in part because they were seen as disruptive to the white settler order. They weren't fulfilling their role in heteropatriarchal society, which almost made them more threatening than a Chinese man in the late 19th century, as white male migrants could be citizens and own property and have rights, but were seen as deviating from that path. In the lumber industry, they lived in all-male bunkhouse communities in the woods and had encounters with men of color; there was a lot of consternation about that and policing of that.Â
Nayan Shah is someone who talks about how the policing of migrant men in the American West was rooted in policing their sexuality, and that's where you begin to see the policing of male sexual encounters. I didn't get into it as much as I wanted to, but a lot of the scholars who work on that topic use police records. But interestingly, Seattle does not have police records that are open to the public. You have annual reports that go back to the 19th century that are summaries of data, but you don't have the police records like you have in California.Â
Are there any developments in Seattle since the bookâs publication last fall that have tweaked your arguments or altered the significance of the book to you?
The fight against displacement in the Chinatown-International District was a big one that had always been on my radar in terms of understanding that it had always been a vulnerable neighborhood. In the post-World War II era of so-called âUrban Renewal,â it was cut in half by the construction of I-5. Itâs been a vulnerable space to displacement and development and these kinds of urban renewal projects. That was a really important connection that people were making with the book in terms of how to apply insights from the book to present-day struggles against displacement.
What would it mean if the C-ID continued to be taken piece by piece? Buildings are such an important part of our understanding of history. A building is a container of memory and attachments to the past. Thereâs a lesson about preserving vernacular and everyday spaces that tell the history of our city in different waysâand that aren't necessarily the buildings of like the rich and famous people in Seattle history, but those of our everyday people, our workers, which are so valuable to preserve and for us to protect. And, at the same time, pushing back against the displacement of the people who are there who are low-income.Â
And there are concrete lessons in the book in terms of municipal policy. A policy can seem really great on its face, but when it's implemented, it can reinforce rather than disrupt inequality. Profanity Hill, which was cleared out for the Yesler Terrace housing project, is a good example of that, even if it was very radical for its time; it created well-designed housing for poor people, yet the way it was implemented was highly exclusionary. I think those kinds of concrete things can be illuminating for moving forward in Seattle today.