Can Seattle be considered a postcolonial city, despite its location in the continental United States? For historian Dorothy Fujita-Rony, who cites the city’s “pivotal role in US military development in the Pacific” for Filipino workers, the answer is a resounding yes.
The story of Seattle is shaped by “the relationship between the United States as former colonizer and the Philippines as former colony,” she explains. For the thousands of men and women who left for new livelihoods after the American conquest of the Philippines, “journeying to Seattle meant heading to a metropole and a site of power.”
As a major port on the West Coast, nineteenth-century Seattle was where newly arrived Filipino laborers disembarked before heading to the farms of California or the canneries of Alaska. With temporary housing options and an established social network, Seattle provided “a relatively secure haven for the migratory laborer passing through, especially given the racism of the time.” Besides being a “significant node in this migratory circuit,” however, Seattle was also important for Filipino colonial subjects since “[m]any Filipinos came to the United States to enlist in the military or to work on local military bases” in the early twentieth century.
Fujita-Rony recounts that, “as part of its expanding focus on the Pacific region,” the United States established a naval yard on the Kitsap Peninsula in 1891. This was followed by Fort Lawton and other installations around Puget Sound, and, later, Fort Lewis, south of Tacoma, in 1917. Since 1901, the US Navy had recruited Filipinos into its ranks, where they served mainly as stewards. Once Fort Lewis was built—a feat accomplished with the help of Filipino labor—Filipinos were also employed by the Pacific Commissary Company as food servers at the fort.
The service roles that were allotted to Filipinos “illustrat[e] the racial hierarchies that would persist in the military throughout most of the 20th century,” Fujita-Rony notes. Seattle’s shipyards grew in importance during World War II, when hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the economy—and local companies like Boeing—in the form of military spending.