The Sakadas: How Filipino Farmworkers Built Hawaii — and Fought to Be Free
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UGAT CLOTHING · HISTORY · Filipino American History Month Series
Post 7 · The Sakadas: How Filipino Farmworkers Built Hawaii — and Fought to Be Free
Between 1906 and 1946, over 125,000 Filipino men sailed across the Pacific to cut sugarcane in Hawaii. They were paid the least of any ethnic group on the plantations. They were given the most dangerous work. They were housed in the oldest barracks, threatened with deportation when they protested, and shot when they struck. And yet they never stopped fighting. This is the story of the Sakadas — and the debt Hawaii owes them.
Every December 20, the state of Hawaii observes Sakada Day — a recognition, passed into law by the Hawaii State Legislature, honoring the Filipino contract laborers who arrived on that date in 1906 and built the foundation of Filipino life in the islands. The first group numbered fifteen men. They came from Candon City in Ilocos Sur, in the northern Philippines. They boarded a ship called the SS Doric at the port of Cabugao, sailed seventeen days across the Pacific, and arrived in Honolulu to be dispatched the following day to the Ola'a Plantation on the Big Island.
Most of them never went home.
Over the next forty years, more than 125,000 Filipino men — and eventually women and children — followed. They came from Ilocos Norte and Sur, from Cebu and the Visayas, from the Tagalog provinces of Luzon. They came because recruiters from the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association (HSPA) told them Hawaii was glorya — glory. A place of opportunity. A better life across the water.
What they found was harder than that. But what they built — in labor, in culture, in resistance, and in community — shaped the Hawaiian Islands in ways that are still being reckoned with today.
125,917
Filipinos brought to Hawaii by the HSPA, 1906–1946
70%
of Hawaii's plantation workforce that was Filipino by 1932
$467
average annual wage for Filipino workers in 1938 — vs. $651 for Japanese workers
16
Filipino workers killed in the Hanapēpē Massacre, 1924
76,000
plantation workers who struck in 1946, winning decisive victory
Dec 20
Sakada Day — recognized by the Hawaii State Legislature
Why Hawaii Wanted Them — and Why They Came
To understand the Sakadas, you have to understand the machinery that created them.
Hawaii's sugar industry had been the economic engine of the islands since the 1830s, when American businessmen began converting Native Hawaiian land into plantation agriculture. By the late 19th century, the industry was vast and hungry for labor. Native Hawaiian workers were dying from introduced diseases and refused, in large numbers, to submit to the brutal plantation system. The planters turned to imported labor — first Chinese, then Japanese, then Portuguese and Puerto Rican. Each group eventually organized, demanded better wages, or left the plantations for other work.
By 1900, the HSPA had a deliberate strategy: maintain a diverse, multi-ethnic workforce specifically to prevent any single group from having enough power to effectively strike. Workers of different nationalities were housed in separate barracks, paid on separate wage scales, and kept as socially divided as possible. This policy was called, openly, "divide and rule."
When the Japanese began leaving the plantations and organizing effectively in the early 1900s, the HSPA looked to the Philippines. The timing was ideal from a colonial-administrative perspective: both Hawaii and the Philippines were U.S. territories, so there were no immigration restrictions on Filipino workers. The HSPA was granted special permission in 1906 from the Philippine Commission — the colonial governing body appointed by Washington — to recruit Filipino laborers.
They deployed recruiters across Ilocos Norte and Sur, across the Visayas, offering wages that sounded extraordinary compared to what Filipino farmworkers earned at home. On December 20, 1906, the first fifteen men boarded the SS Doric. They were young — some teenagers, some in their early twenties — and most of them were farmers from Ilocos who had never seen an ocean voyage of this scale. They had been told they were going to glorya.
Who Were the Sakadas?
🌾 The word: Sakada comes from Visayan, meaning "seasonal farm laborer." It became the universal term for Filipino plantation workers in Hawaii, regardless of region of origin.
🗺 Where they came from: Most came from three regions — Ilocanos from the northwest coast of Luzon (the largest group), Visayans from the central islands, and Tagalogs from southern Luzon. The HSPA specifically shifted recruitment to Ilocanos after 1924, because Visayans had been organizing effectively.
👤 Who they were: Mostly single young men, recruited with promises of high wages. Many were farmers or laborers in the Philippines who had heard stories of Hawaii's prosperity. They signed three-to-five-year contracts and were expected to return home — most stayed.
⚓ The journey: Seventeen days across the Pacific, in the lower decks of ships designed for cargo. Many arrived sick. Those who died during the crossing were buried at sea.
🏚 What they found: Plantation barracks — segregated by ethnicity — for which they paid rent. A ten-hour workday, six days a week. Wages as low as 90 cents a day, the lowest of any ethnic group on the plantations. Work assigned by a luna (foreman) who could dock pay or discipline workers without appeal.
Life on the Plantation: Backbreaking Work and Community Built from Nothing
Sugarcane work was among the most physically punishing labor in American agriculture. The cane had to be planted, cultivated by hand, cut at harvest with long machetes, then hauled to the mills. The fields were muddy, the cane leaves sharp as razors, and the heat relentless. Workers began before dawn and finished after dusk. Overseers on horseback — the lunas — patrolled the fields and could dock wages on the spot for what they deemed insufficient effort.
Filipino workers were assigned the most labor-intensive tasks and paid the least for them. In 1938, a Filipino worker earned an annual average of $467 — compared to $651 for a Japanese worker doing similar work. They were housed in the oldest and most deteriorated plantation barracks, which they paid rent to occupy. They bought their groceries at the company store at inflated prices. They had essentially no recourse against arbitrary punishment.
And yet — within these constraints, the Sakadas built something.
They planted their own vegetable gardens in the spaces behind the barracks. They fished the coastlines and streams of the islands. They shared food across barracks lines, across ethnic lines. They organized rosarios and fiestas, recreating Philippine traditions in the soil of a Pacific island thousands of miles from home. They sent money home — remittances that, even in the depths of the Great Depression, totaled $276,000 a month from Hawaii to the Philippines in 1929. That money educated their children, supported their parents, and built the next generation of Filipino families.
The Sakadas were not simply instruments of production, as the HSPA liked to think of them. They were full human beings — with humor and grief and ambition and creativity — making a life out of the very little they had been given.
The Delano Manongs Collection
The Sakadas of Hawaii and the Manongs of the California fields were the same generation — Filipino farmworkers who crossed oceans and continents to build American abundance with their hands. The Delano Manongs Collection honors their labor and their legacy.
Pablo Manlapit: The Man Who Wouldn't Stop Fighting
Among all the figures who emerged from the Sakada era, none is more important — or more complicated — than Pablo Manlapit.
Born in Lipa City, Batangas in 1891, Manlapit arrived in Hawaii in 1910 as a sugarcane laborer under contract to the Hamakua Mill Company on the Big Island. He was smart, ambitious, and deeply angry about what he saw. Within a few years he had left the fields, taught himself law, and passed the bar exam — becoming one of the first Filipino lawyers in Hawaii. He used his legal skills in the service of the people he had worked alongside: Filipino plantation workers who had no one else to advocate for them.
In 1919, Manlapit formed the Filipino Labor Union (FLU). In 1920, he led a historic joint strike with the Japanese Federation of Labor — the first time workers of two different nationalities had united in a single organized action in Hawaii. Over 8,000 workers stopped working across Oahu plantations. The HSPA responded by evicting over 12,000 workers from their plantation housing, flooding the fields with strikebreakers, and running a media campaign designed to split the Filipino and Japanese workers apart. The strike eventually collapsed, but the vision of multiracial labor solidarity it represented would prove prophetic.
Manlapit pressed on. In 1922 he founded the High Wage Movement with AFL representative George Wright, demanding the HSPA raise the minimum daily wage from $1 to $2 and reduce the workday from ten hours to eight. Over 6,000 workers signed the petition. The HSPA did not even respond to it.
In April 1924, Filipino plantation workers went on strike across Oahu, Maui, the Big Island, and Kauai. What happened next would become one of the most tragic and least-remembered events in American labor history.
"You know how the boss treat us before? They don't call your name. They just say, 'Hey, boy!' We didn't like that, so we started a union."
— A Filipino Sakada, interviewed decades after the plantation era, quoted in Flux magazine
September 9, 1924: The Hanapēpē Massacre
The 1924 strike spread across the islands through the spring and summer. The HSPA deployed its standard tools: strikebreakers brought in from other plantations, evictions of strikers from their housing, press campaigns designed to demonize Filipino workers, and the National Guard. On the island of Kauai, the standoff was especially tense.
On September 9, 1924, at the plantation town of Hanapēpē on Kauai's southwest coast, a dispute erupted at a strike camp. Two Ilocano workers, allegedly breaking the strike, had been detained by Visayan strikers. Local police arrived, heavily armed, to retrieve them. What happened next — who fired first, whether the strikers were armed or reacting to police aggression — is disputed in the historical record. What is not disputed is the outcome.
Sixteen Filipino workers were shot dead. Four police officers died. Dozens more were wounded on both sides. It was the bloodiest incident in the history of labor in Hawaii.
⚠️ The Hanapēpē Massacre — September 9, 1924
What happened: At a strike camp in Hanapēpē, Kauai, police arrived to retrieve two Ilocano workers held by Visayan strikers. A confrontation erupted. In the ensuing violence, 16 Filipino workers and 4 police officers were killed.
The aftermath: Over 100 strikers were arrested. Seventy-six were charged. Sixty received four-year prison sentences. Pablo Manlapit — who was not present at Hanapēpē — was charged with conspiracy and sentenced to two to ten years in prison. He was paroled on the condition that he leave Hawaii. Other labor leaders were deported to the Philippines.
The impact: The massacre effectively ended the 1924 strike and crushed the Filipino labor movement for more than a decade. The HSPA stopped recruiting Visayan Filipinos, shifting entirely to Ilocanos — whom they believed would be less likely to organize. Sugar company dividends that year averaged 17 percent. No one was charged with murder in the deaths of the Filipino workers.
The memory: The massacre was almost entirely forgotten for eighty years. A commemorative marker was finally placed in Hanapēpē Town Park in 2006, on the centennial of the first Sakadas' arrival. In 2024, Kauai County held a ceremony on the 100th anniversary attended by nearly 150 participants.
The lesson of Hanapēpē was not that resistance was futile. It was that Filipino workers alone — divided by regional identity, denied solidarity by a plantation system designed to keep them apart — could not win. It would take a different kind of organizing to change things.
1946: The Strike That Finally Won
In the years after Hanapēpē, Filipino workers continued to resist in smaller, persistent ways — twelve strikes between 1920 and 1940, most of them crushed. But a new organizational form was emerging. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) had been building since the late 1930s, with a fundamentally different approach than Manlapit's era: a single, industry-wide union that included all workers regardless of ethnicity, a union that could not be broken by dividing Ilocanos against Visayans or Filipinos against Japanese.
"An injury to one is an injury to all." That was the ILWU's slogan. The Sakadas, who had lived the consequences of division for four decades, understood it immediately.
On September 1, 1946, the ILWU called a strike across Hawaii's sugar industry. It was the largest and most successful labor action in the history of the islands. 76,000 workers — Filipino, Japanese, Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, all together — walked off 33 of Hawaii's 34 sugar plantations. The strike lasted 79 days. The workers won: higher wages, better housing, a 40-hour workweek, and — crucially — union recognition. The plantation system that had dominated Hawaiian life for a century was broken.
Filipinos were, by that point, the largest ethnic group in the plantation workforce. Without their numbers, discipline, and the organizing experience accumulated through decades of earlier struggle — including through the painful lessons of Hanapēpē — the 1946 victory would not have been possible.
The Sakadas had built the industry. Now they had transformed it.
The Road from 1906 to 1946: A Labor Timeline
Dec 1906
First 15 Sakadas arrive in Honolulu aboard the SS Doric. Dispatched to Ola'a Plantation on the Big Island the following day.
1919
Pablo Manlapit forms the Filipino Labor Union — the first organized representation for Filipino plantation workers in Hawaii.
1920
Historic joint strike with the Japanese Federation of Labor. Over 8,000 workers stop work across Oahu. The HSPA evicts 12,000 workers from plantation housing. Strike is broken but multiracial solidarity is proven possible.
1922
Manlapit founds the High Wage Movement. Over 6,000 workers sign a petition demanding $2-a-day wages and an 8-hour day. The HSPA ignores it entirely.
Apr 1924
High Wage Movement strike begins across Oahu, Maui, Big Island, and Kauai. 23 of 45 plantations are affected.
Sep 9, 1924
Hanapēpē Massacre. 16 Filipino workers killed. 60 sentenced to four years in prison. Manlapit imprisoned, then exiled. Strike collapses. The Filipino labor movement enters a decade of suppression.
1932
Filipinos become 70% of Hawaii's plantation workforce — the majority on which the entire industry depends.
1937
The Vibora Luviminda union leads a successful strike on Maui — the last racially-exclusive union action before the ILWU era. Proves Filipinos can win when organized.
1946
Last wave of Sakadas arrive — 6,000 men, including for the first time significant numbers of women and families. ILWU calls the Great Sugar Strike. 76,000 workers across ethnic lines stop 33 of 34 plantations. After 79 days, they win decisively: higher wages, 40-hour week, union recognition.
What the Sakadas Left Behind: Hawaii's Filipino Culture
The Sakadas did not only build an industry and a labor movement. They built a culture — the Filipino culture of Hawaii, which is today one of the most vibrant expressions of Filipino identity anywhere in the world outside the Philippines itself.
They brought Ilocano and Visayan languages, which still survive in the islands. They brought their food — their recipes for pinakbet and dinuguan and kare-kare, which became embedded in Hawaii's own culinary culture, influencing the broader local food landscape. They brought their music and their dances, their rosarios and their fiestas, their patron saint celebrations that continue today. They built churches and community halls. They organized mutual aid societies. They forged friendships and families across ethnic lines — Filipino-Japanese, Filipino-Hawaiian, Filipino-Chinese — marriages and communities that contributed to the extraordinary multicultural character that defines Hawaii today.
Filipinos are now the second-largest ethnic group in Hawaii, making up more than a quarter of the state's population. That community — its schools, its churches, its businesses, its political presence, its cultural vibrancy — grew from the roots the Sakadas planted. Every Filipino in Hawaii today is, in some way, a product of the choices those fifteen men made in December 1906 when they boarded a ship in Cabugao and sailed into the unknown.
In Candon City, Ilocos Sur — the hometown of the first fifteen Sakadas — there is a monument in the main square honoring their memory. Inside the historic Cariño House, now a museum, a section is dedicated to the first Sakadas: artifacts, photographs, a trunk that belonged to one of them. His daughters, in their forties and sixties when last interviewed, remembered their father returning to Candon at age seventy, finally home after decades in the fields of Hawaii. He had never gone back before. He was one of the lucky ones — many Sakadas died in Hawaii and were buried there, far from the Philippines.
"The lives of their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren have all been uplifted because of the sacrifices that they made."
— Cabugao Mayor Josh Cobangbang, whose town has a sister-city agreement with Hawaii County since 2017, speaking about the first Sakadas
Roots Across Oceans
The Sakadas left the Philippines carrying nothing but their labor and their heritage. They built the largest Filipino community outside the Philippines — in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. At UGAT, we design for the people who carry those roots wherever they go.
The Bridge to the Mainland: From Hawaii to Delano
The story of the Sakadas does not stay in Hawaii. It flows directly into the mainland labor movement that the previous post in this series described.
Many Sakadas who came through Hawaii eventually made their way to California — to the asparagus fields of Stockton, the lettuce rows of Salinas, the grape vineyards of Delano. They carried with them the organizing experience and the labor consciousness forged in the Hawaiian plantations. The men who became the leadership of the Filipino farmworker movement on the mainland — including Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz — were part of this same generation, this same tradition of Filipino labor resistance that traced its roots directly to the Sakadas and to Pablo Manlapit.
When Larry Itliong led the Delano Grape Strike in 1965, he was drawing on forty years of accumulated labor organizing experience that had begun in the cane fields of Hawaii. The Sakadas were not just Hawaii's story. They were the foundation of Filipino American labor history, from Hanapēpē to Delano.
December 20: Remember the Fifteen
On December 20, 1906, fifteen young Filipino men arrived in Honolulu with nothing but their bodies and their labor. They were told they were going to glory. They found backbreaking work, racial discrimination, inadequate housing, and wages calibrated to keep them dependent. They found themselves separated from their families by 5,000 miles of ocean.
And they stayed. And they organized. And they struck, and were beaten, and struck again. They sent money home every month. They planted gardens. They celebrated fiestas. They built community from almost nothing, in a place that was not theirs and was not the Philippines and was not yet home — until, slowly, it became home.
By 1946, they had won. Not everything — the plantations were still owned by the same five families, the Big Five that had monopolized Hawaiian economics for a century. But the workers had recognition. They had wages that could sustain a family. They had a union. They had the beginning of political power.
The Sakadas of Hawaii are among the most important and least-celebrated figures in Filipino American history. They arrived in an era before Filipino American History Month, before anyone thought to record the stories of contract laborers from Ilocos, before the names of Apolonio Ramos and Severino Sagun and Florenzo Ramos were written down anywhere that history would preserve.
Now they have Sakada Day. Now they have their own memorial in the main square of Candon City. Now they have films, academic research, community archives. Now they have descendants who are mayors and lawmakers and teachers and doctors — children of the sacrifice those fifteen men made when they boarded a ship at the port of Cabugao and didn't look back.
Their names deserve to be spoken out loud. On December 20 every year, and every day in between.
Recognized by the Hawaii State Legislature
🌿 December 20: Sakada Day
Sakada Day honors the Filipino contract laborers who first arrived in Hawaii on December 20, 1906, and the 125,000 who followed. It recognizes their sacrifices, their labor, their resistance, and their foundational role in building Filipino life in Hawaii and the broader Filipino American community. Mark the date. Say their names.
💬 Join the Conversation
Do you have Sakada ancestry? Is your family from Ilocos, from the Visayas, from any of the communities that sent workers to Hawaii? Share your family's story in the comments. Every name that is spoken is one less name that history gets to erase. And if you're based in Hawaii — how does Sakada Day show up in your community?
📖 FAHM Series: "Mga Bayani ng Kasaysayan" — Post 7 of 7
This post is part of UGAT's Filipino American History Month series exploring the figures and moments that shaped the Filipino American story
Know Your Roots
Get Filipino heritage stories, new collection drops, and cultural deep-dives from UGAT — not just in October.
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