Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Caucasians
Next to Hawaiians themselves, Caucasians have the longest history in Hawai'i. They
settled in earnest since the missionaries of the 1820s and were established long before any
other migrant group. Caucasians have a distinction separating them from all other ethnic
groups in Hawai'i in that they are lumped together as one. A person can be anything from
a Protestant Norwegian dockworker to a Greek Orthodox shipping tycoon, but if his or her
skin is light, in Hawai'i, he or she is a
haole.
What's more, a person could have arrived at
Waikiki from Missoula, Montana, in the last 24 hours, or his or her
kama'aina
family can
go back five generations, but again, if the person is Caucasian, he or she is a
haole.
The word
haole
has a floating connotation that depends upon the spirit in which it's
used. It can mean everything from a derisive “honky” or “cracker” to nothing more than
“white person.” The exact Hawaiian meaning is clouded, although it largely has to do with
the fact that when white people first arrived, they lacked any true
ha,
which means “spir-
it,” or “breath.” Europeans did not “share breath” in the same way that many Polynesian
cultures would (such as the traditional greeting of pressing noses rather than hands), and
this lack of “breath” lives on today in the semi-derogatory term.
Portuguese
Between 1878 and 1887, around 12,000 Portuguese came to Hawai'i. Later on, between
1906 and 1913, 6,000 more arrived. They were put to work on plantations and gained a
reputation as good workers. Although they were European, for some reason they weren't
haole,
just somewhere in between. Nearly 27,000 Portuguese made up 11 percent of
Hawai'i's population by 1920. They intermarried, and the Portuguese remain an ethnic
group in Hawai'i today. One item they brought in that would influence local culture was
the
cavaquinho,
a stringed instrument that would evolve into the ukulele.
Filipinos
The Filipinos who came to Hawai'i brought high hopes of amassing personal fortunes and
returning home as rich heroes, but for most it was a dream that never came true. Filipinos
had been U.S. nationals ever since the Spanish-American War of 1898 and as such wer-
en't subject to immigration laws that curtailed the importation of other Asian workers. The
first to arrive were 15 families in 1906, but a large number came in 1924 as strikebreakers.
From the first, Filipinos were looked down upon by all the other immigrant groups and
were considered particularly uncouth by the Japanese. The value they placed on education
was the lowest of any group, and even by 1930 only about half could speak rudimentary
