Sugar industry had hand in creating Hawaiis melting pot | News, Sports, Jobs

Since the news of Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co.’s last harvest and closure this year, there has been a familiar refrain from residents whose families came to Hawaii from faraway lands to work in the cane fields.

“We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for sugar.”

For Audrey Rocha Reed, a longtime Maui community leader, her grandfather came to Maui from Madeira, Portugal, in 1886 to work for the plantations. Since then, several generations of Rochas have worked for the plantations, including Maui Agricultural Co. or “MA Company,” as known to the old-timers, that merged with HC&S in 1948.

“I’m looking at my grandfather, my father, my brother, his son, so we have a long history with the sugar industry,” said Rocha Reed, who grew up in the Hamakuapoko plantation camp near Paia.

Her story is a common one. Many longtime residents have roots to the sugar plantations. Sugar growers recruited laborers worldwide in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Many of the immigrant workers raised families on their plantation salaries, and sons, daughters and grandchildren of immigrants became political leaders, doctors, attorneys and other successful people.

Longtime Maui residents, HC&S retirees and former plantation employees all were saddened by the news last week that this year will be HC&S’ last. After this harvesting season, which concludes at the end of the year, the state’s last surviving sugar plantation, with a history spanning 145 years, will turn to diversified agriculture.

The decision came as the company’s agribusiness sector sustained $30 million in losses in 2015 with a future of more “significant losses” that officials at parent company Alexander & Baldwin called unsustainable. The workforce of 675 will be reduced to 15 by the end of the year, with the first group of layoffs beginning in March.

“Obviously, it’s really a sad day for the community not only economical but socially and culturally,” said Wailuku resident Howard Nakamura, a former executive with A&B.

“HC&S has been such an integral part of Maui. I feel it a little more because my grandparents came over from Japan to work on the plantations. Our family roots are with the plantation. I think it’s a really sad day,” said Nakamura, who was president of Wailea Resort Co., an A&B affiliate.

“When you think about all the years HC&S has been part of the community, now it’s not going to be there. You look out from my house, you can go out and see the cane fields. You think what’s going to be there,” he added.

Nakamura, a county planning department director in Mayor Elmer Cravalho’s administration and county managing director in Mayor Hannibal Tavares’ administration, said that he worked with A&B while at the county and had no problems and received much cooperation.

He said A&B and its subsidiaries have done a lot for affordable housing, infrastructure development and recreational facilities. For example, HC&S developed the “Dream City” master planned community in Kahului in the late 1940s.

“Often people forget those kinds of things. They view them as the big bad corporation. That’s not the case. They’ve done so much for the community. I think people tend to gloss that over (or say) they got a lot of money, they can afford it.”

The Hawaii sugar industry dates back to 1835 when the first successful sugar plantation was established on Kauai, according to the A&B Sugar Museum website. The A&B Sugar Museum next to the Puunene Mill is not owned by HC&S and is an independent nonprofit organization, said its director, Roslyn Lightfoot. The museum will remain open.

At one point, there were more than 30 sugar plantations of various sizes on Maui in places including Ulupalakua, Hana, Kipahulu and Haiku.

A&B’s roots are on Maui, where Samuel Thomas Alexander and Henry Perrine Baldwin planted their first crop of sugar cane in 1870 on the 570-acre Alexander and Baldwin plantation in Makawao. Sugar growers privately developed an extensive irrigation system, tapping streams in East Maui, that today still provides a significant portion of the plantation’s water and some drinking water for Upcountry. The industry also built company housing, stores, hospitals and churches, which evolved into self-contained communities that included most of the island’s population, according to the museum.

The plantation recruited workers from all over the world.

According to the Center for Labor Education & Research at the University of Hawaii at West Oahu, Native Hawaiians initially worked on the plantations, but soon walked off their jobs because the work was not in keeping with their traditions of working for themselves and their families. The plantations turned to imported labor to solve their problem.

The first group of laborers was recruited from China; between 1850 and 1900, about 46,000 Chinese came to Hawaii. A large wave of Japanese began arriving in 1885 and was the largest of the immigrant groups brought in for plantation labor. By 1900, more than 80,000 Japanese had come to Hawaii to work in the sugar cane fields, according to the Center for Labor Education & Research.

‘The majority of Portuguese began arriving in the islands in 1878, with many already skilled in sugar production, Rocha Reed said. Puerto Ricans, who had been on the Mainland trying to find jobs, began arriving in Hawaii from San Francisco on Dec. 23, 1900. She said 100 of them arrived on Oahu. The plantations on Oahu didn’t want them, so they came to Lahaina, where their labor was needed.

Filipinos began arriving in Hawaii to work on the plantations in 1906, a recruitment that continued until the late 1940s.

Relations between the plantation and immigrant workers were not always smooth, with low wages and fierce overseers, or luna, who rode on horses and carried whips to use on workers. There were allegations of discrimination, where Japanese workers were paid $18 a month for 26 days of work, while Portuguese and Puerto Ricans workers received $22.50.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union organized the sugar laborers in the 1930s and organized strikes statewide, including the landmark 1946 event that led to higher wages, a standard workweek and the political revolution that has the Democratic Party still in power in Hawaii today.

Workers would later praise HC&S for its training and hiring of women and its dedication to employees and the community.

Early workers settled into plantation camps that were scattered around the island. HC&S had large plantation camp clusters with names such as Nashiwa, School and Alabama camps in Paia and Puunene, around its mills. Ethnic groups lived together in some of the camps and children used to swim in the plantation’s irrigation ditches.

A county general plan 2030 report said that in 1939 there were 30 HC&S camps with 1,545 individual houses. The HC&S plantation population was 7,973, which included workers and their families; Maui’s 1940 population was 46,919.

There were four public schools, three Japanese language schools and 10 churches in the camps. Recreational facilities included a swim tank, gymnasium, three theaters and baseball and athletic fields, according to the report prepared in 2006 by Chris Hart & Partners for the county’s long-range planning division.

Rocha Reed said that her grandfather, who couldn’t speak English, worked as a sugar boiler in Madeira and took the same job on Maui. Technology assists workers today but in her grandfather’s day workers did their jobs on instinct and experience.

“By sight, by feel of the boil, (he knew) when you had to stop so the sugar would not crystalize (and) turn into molasses,” she said.

Because her grandfather couldn’t speak English, he was given less pay. A Scotsman whom her grandfather worked with but “was lousy at his job” could speak English and got a higher wage, Rocha Reed said.

Her father was a water luna at the plantation. She said he developed a device that made the flume gates rise when water was needed and then lowered when water was sufficient. The device was patented by Maui Agricultural Co., and her father received $100. That “was a lot of money” in the 1920s, she added.

Former and retired workers at HC&S reflected back about their time at the company.

Fred Dagdag of Waiehu got his first job in Hawaii at HC&S in 1966 after arriving from the Philippines. His older brother was a sakada, or one of the first Filipino immigrants to the sugar plantations, and laid the foundation for his arrival.

Dagdag worked in the fields cutting cane. “It is very hard,” he said.

He later moved up the ranks and became a boiler operator at the Paia Mill. He left the plantation in 1974 to become a state firefighter and is now retired.

Dagdag, a former president of the Maui Filipino Community Council, said that he felt bad about the closure and wondered how workers will pay their bills. He, personally, had a good experience working at the plantation and got along well with his bosses and his multi-ethnic co-workers.

At 87 years old, Kahului resident Henry Nakamura (no relation to Howard Nakamura) recalled starting work for HC&S in 1949 in the cane fields, where he sprayed chemicals to get rid of weeds. Having flat feet that made the field work difficult, he soon took a job driving a supply truck, following field workers around.

His other jobs included reading water meters in the field and reporting results; being a clerk in the “Clerical Pool,” a centralized office where all the clerks worked; and keeping tabs on trucks and tractors in the plantation’s budget section.

“At least we had a job,” Nakamura said of his experiences. “Those days was good. It was fun.”

“I felt sad that they are going to close,” he said. “I guess you can’t beat the minority, minority always stronger than the majority for the cane smoke.”

But Nakamura understood, too, that the company wasn’t making money, compounding the community pressure against the agricultural practices that all ended up being factors in the closure of HC&S.

He and other former HC&S workers and longtime Maui residents questioned anti-cane burning activists’ decision to continue their legal actions over agricultural burns even with the news that sugar will be gone. The opponents of cane burning have said that a court order to invalidate HC&S’ cane burning permit is necessary to prevent the company from reversing course and to protect the public’s right to clean air.

“Sugar cane is ending in Hawaii,” Rocha Reed said. “Enough already.”

* Melissa Tanji can be reached at mtanji@mauinews.com.

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