Seattle from the Margins

"One of the strengths of Asaka’s book is the way it writes “history from below,” digging up information about ordinary, struggling, marginalized people who don’t leave records or interest standard historians. The result is a book that is full of insights, characters, and new story lines...This brave book is well-written and bracing."

"Asaka deftly foregrounds the experiences of transient and surveilled workers to tell the story of Seattle’s intercultural commerce and communities. [Her] tour de force offers lessons and strategies for local mobilization today."

"Asaka's book provides a model for how to examine other cities in our collective work to address structural racism in the U.S."

"[An] instant classic. . . . Stunningly original in the way she mines elusive sources, Asaka’s exhaustive research demonstrates the persistent thorniness of telling “histories from below” due to archival preferences for elite and middle-class stories."

"Seattle has always been a working city, and Megan Asaka's compelling account of labor, race, and migration in and around the Northwest's largest city gives us new ways of seeing and understanding this fact. Caught up in imperial networks, systems of segregation, and the logics of racial capitalism, the workers of Seattle both transformed and were transformed by their encounters with the city and surrounding spaces. A must-read for anyone interested in the region's history or in the intersections between labor and race more generally."

"Asaka asks us to take a fresh look at Seattle to see the migratory workers whose labor helped to build the segregated urban landscape they lived within. Rich with detail and insight, Seattle from the Margins captures the overlapping forces of race, migration, labor, and colonialism in the making of this Pacific hub."

"Imaginatively reveals Seattle’s vibrant multi-racial creators—the Indigenous people and Asian migrants—who toiled and struggled in the city’s first century and whose forgotten intimacies and legacies expose the sediments of racial segregation.”"

"Megan Asaka's deeply researched and brilliantly argued history reveals how Asian and Indigenous workers built the Emerald City—and how their labors and legacies were all but erased in the name of so-called progress."

"A rare comparative and relational history of race and migration in the Puget Sound area. Its rigorous examination of Native, Chinese, and Japanese experiences and their relationship to a larger history of racial contestation and displacement is truly significant."