Unbecoming Workers

• Main Author: Hu Pegues, Juliana
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Carolina Press 2020
• Subjects: tlingit
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469656182.003.0004

By the 1910s, salmon canneries emerged as a predominant industry of the Alaskan economy, dependent on the racialized and gendered labor of migrant Asian men and resident Native women. Chapter 3 excavates the traces of a labor union by examining two repeating figures, the Asian male sex worker and the promiscuous Native woman, to ask how unproductive workers elucidate contingent understandings of land and labor. Cannery documents and other archival sources form the first half of the chapter; the second half examines the narratives of cannery work expressed in the poetry of Tlingit author Nora Marks Dauenhauer and in Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan’s novel America Is in the Heart to ruminate on queer affinities within settler colonial racial capitalism.