View Seattle’s history from a new vantage point, that of the migrant workers who built the city with a discussion between Megan Asaka, author of Seattle From the Margins: Migrant labor History in 19th and 20th Centuries, and Seattle Times columnist Naomi Ishisaka, at 2:30pm on December 3rd at the Central Library.
The eagerly anticipated Peak Pick, Seattle from the Margins: Migrant Labor History in 19th & 20th Centuries by Megan Asaka is on library shelves now!
Seattle from the Margins examines the intersection of race and class in historical migrant communities that worked in the Pacific Northwest and built Seattle in the 19th and 20th centuries. Migrant workers are people whose lives are transient as they follow seasonal or temporary work, such as farming, logging, and fishing, all of which were—and still are—major contributors to Western Washington’s economy. Asaka was partially inspired by her own family’s history and weaves together the complex lives of displaced Coast Salish Indigenous peoples and immigrants from Japan and China; and how their communities intermingled. Seattle became a “stopping place” where people would gather as the work shifted up and down the Puget Sound, up into Alaska, and down into Oregon, but also became a place where migrants found solidarity and built communities and families together. Continue reading “Explore Seattle from the Margins with historian Megan Asaka”