Sakadas to Servers: The New Working Class in Postwar Hawaiʻi and the Globalizing Pacific

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Friday, December 4, 2026 | 6pm to 7:30pm

Zoom: RSVP

Issay Matsumoto will present on a chapter, completed with an award from the 2023 Betty Lee Sung Research Endowment Fund, from his dissertation, “Searching for the Union Sister.” Matsumoto examines the formation of a new workforce beyond Hawaiian plantations—one that was majority-Filipinx, female, immigrant, and employed in the State’s colonial tourism industry—from the 1950s through the 1990s. 

Author Bio

Issay Matsumoto is a Ph.D. student in the Van Hunnick History Department at the University of Southern California. He received his B.A. from Tufts University, majoring in History and American Studies with a minor in Asian American Studies. He is writing a dissertation on labor, migration, and empire in twentieth-century Hawaiʻi.