1 © Multiethnic Seattle Two Views of Jackson Street n two well-known works of Asian American literature—one autobio- graphical and the other fictional—that offer descriptions of life in pre– World War II Seattle, the bustling tempo and multiethnic character of Iurban life immediately strike the reader. In her 1953 memoir, Nisei Daughter, Monica Sone recalls an idyllic childhood preceding and contrasting starkly with the jarring experience of wartime Japanese internment. Born in 1919, she portrayed 1920s and 1930s Seattle, especially the working-class Jackson Street neighborhood, as an exhilarating place, pulsing with business activity and people from all walks of life. “Our street itself was a compact little world, teeming with the bustle of every kind of business in existence in Skidrow,” writes Sone.1 Aware that others derided the neighborhood she called home and where her parents operated hotel and laundry businesses as “skid row,” she nonetheless recollects with fondness, “This was the playground where I roamed freely and happily.”2 Her daily treks to school were adventures in and of themselves: When I finally started grammar school, I found still another enchant- ing world. Every morning I hurried to Adams Hotel . and called for Matsuko. Together we made the long and fascinating journey— Copyright © 2011. Temple University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2011. Temple University Copyright from First Avenue to Twelfth Avenue—to Bailey Gatzert School. We meandered through the international section of town, past the small Japanese shops and stores, already bustling in the early morn- Lee, Shelley Sang-Hee. Claiming the Oriental Gateway : Prewar Seattle and Japanese America, Temple University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=631703. Created from washington on 2017-11-03 14:37:55. 20 CHAPTER 1 ing hour, past the cafes and barber shops filled with Filipino men, and through Chinatown.3 In his 1946 semiautobiographical novel, America Is in the Heart, the Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan makes Seattle a pivotal location in the odys- sey of his protagonist, Carlos, an immigrant itinerant worker in the 1930s American West. The city was Carlos’s (as well as the real-life Bulosan’s) point of disembarkation from the Philippines and a place to which he periodi- cally returns or seeks to return in the course of his circuitous life in North America. Following a series of harrowing encounters with racial violence in California and Montana, Carlos goes back to Seattle. During his bus ride, he remembers his initial journey there and ponders, “When had it been that this bright city had softened the sadness in my heart?” Upon arriving, however, he finds neither familiarity nor comfort, but a continuation of his despair: I left the bus and walked around the block, watching for Oriental signs on the buildings and stores. I found the hotel where I had stayed when I arrived in Seattle from the Philippines, but it was now under new management. I took a room for twenty-five cents and sneaked away with the sheets the next morning. I sold them in a Negro store down the block. That would be my first deliberately dishonest act.4 Although these passages paint very different pictures and evoke nearly oppo- site emotions, as Sone’s conveys a child’s wonder about her surroundings while Bulosan’s illustrates an immigrant’s isolation and agony, it is striking that both writers highlight the multiethnic character of the urban environs in creating their distinct impressions of life in the city. Such dense and multiethnic settlements where Chinese, Japanese, Filipi- nos, blacks, and other minorities lived and worked could be found in pockets throughout the urban West Coast during the early twentieth century. These took shape from pull factors connected to the U.S. conquest and exploita- tion of the West as well as the forces of trans-Pacific and internal migration and racial segregation. Scholars have examined the unique social formations, identities, and challenges that emerged in these communities that were strik- ing for their diversity as well as their isolation and marginalization from the white societies that neighbored them.5 Reflecting the broader transnational turn in U.S. history and American studies, a significant portion of the liter- Copyright © 2011. Temple University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2011. Temple University Copyright ature—much of which focuses on Los Angeles—examines how the location of West Coast cities within global networks of people and capital contrib- uted to not only the growth of a diverse population but also the ideological Lee, Shelley Sang-Hee. Claiming the Oriental Gateway : Prewar Seattle and Japanese America, Temple University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=631703. Created from washington on 2017-11-03 14:37:55. MULTIETHNIC SEATTLE 21 and imaginative meanings applied to urban space and the people making claims to it. As discussed in the Introduction, this book draws on recent scholarship that employs a “Pacific world” perspective to illuminate how the American West has historically been part of expansive systems of migration, politics, and commerce, thereby highlighting the salience of Asia and Asian people in the construction of the Pacific world and the history of the West.6 Toward explicating what it meant for Seattle and its Japanese Ameri- can residents to be part of the Pacific world and exploring the relationship between Pacific-world dynamics and local racial formations, this chapter describes the emergence of the city’s minority population between the 1870s and the 1930s, with particular attention on Asian and black settlement in the section that would become known as Jackson Street. Although Jackson Street was, by most accounts, a rough and seamy area from which “respect- able” residents warily kept their distance, it was also a vibrant, ethnically and racially diverse place, and the landscape against which much of Seattle Japanese American history played out. Furthermore, for such individuals as Sone and thousands of other ethnic and racial minorities, these peripheral and derided places were their “America.” This aspect of Seattle’s history also speaks to a larger story about the American West and its cities, for multi- raciality and ethnic diversity have long been regarded as key distinguish- ing factors in the region’s history.7 From the gold-mining societies of the mid-nineteenth century, American conquest and development of the region simultaneously entailed the displacement of Indians and Mexicans and in- migration of whites, Asians, blacks, and Latin Americans.8 Jackson Street’s multiracial past also points to the need for an analysis of race in the West that employs an expanded lens that takes account of the presence of mul- tiple, not just two, racial groups. From the early to mid-1900s, “Jackson Street” referred to a part of the city south of the downtown business district. Its boundaries had always been amorphous, and by the early 1950s, the name had largely fallen out of usage by residents. Jackson Street emerged from a vaguely defined part of the city south of Yesler Way, and over the years its various subsections and areas with which it overlapped have gone by a multitude of names: Skid Row, “Skid Road,” Jackson-Yesler, the Lava Beds, Chinatown, Nihonmachi, and the International District, to name a few. Despite its uncertain bound- aries and changing monikers, what was clear by the 1920s was that Jackson Street bore the legacy of Skid Row’s notoriety and was home to most of Copyright © 2011. Temple University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2011. Temple University Copyright the city’s nonwhite residents and other ethnic minorities. A product of suc- cessive migrations and settlements, Jackson Street’s social makeup was also the result of the consolidation of white privilege; the city’s racial minorities Lee, Shelley Sang-Hee. Claiming the Oriental Gateway : Prewar Seattle and Japanese America, Temple University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=631703. Created from washington on 2017-11-03 14:37:55. 22 CHAPTER 1 concentrated there in large part because they were not welcome anywhere else. By looking closely at this pocket of the city, which was also the site of Seattle’s Japantown, this chapter seeks to bring out of the margins a neigh- borhood that we know little about and to assert its central place in Seattle’s multiracial past. From Frontier Town to Urban Revolution Founded in 1851 and incorporated in 1869, Seattle was a modest “village town” through much of the second half of the nineteenth century and underwent its “urban revolution” between the 1890s and 1910s. Defying the image of west- ward-bound families in covered wagons seeking homesteads on which to farm and to subsist, Seattle’s early Anglo settlers, who included Henry Yesler, Doc Maynard, and Arthur Denny, were a very enterprising group, arriving from such states as Ohio and Illinois and bringing with them dreams of commer- cial riches and visions of a future urban metropolis. In fact, the first settlers called their new town “New York-Alki” (New York by and by).9 Although its deep-water harbors and nearby abundant natural resources encouraged set- tlers to imagine that their settlement would eventually become to the Pacific what New York was to the Atlantic, throughout its frontier period, Seattle struggled mightily to rival not coastal ports San Francisco and Portland, but rather nearby towns and hamlets such as Port Townsend, Olympia, Tacoma, and Mukilteo. With an early economy driven by supplying lumber, fishery products, coal, grains, and other exports to San Francisco and to various hin- terland communities in the interior, by 1880, Seattle had developed a fairly sophisticated urban economy that included meatpacking, carpentry, furniture industries, and such services as law offices, banks, doctors’ offices, and stores.