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Considers what the military presence in Hawai’i tells us about colonialism, gender, race, and class.

Everywhere you look in Hawai’i, you might see the military. And yet, in daily life few residents see the military at all-it is hidden in plain sight. This paradox of invisibility and visibility, of the available and the hidden, is the subject of Oh, Say, Can You See?, which maps the power relations involving gender, race, and class that define Hawai’i in relation to the national security state.

Western intruders into Hawai’i-from the early explorers, missionaries, and sugar planters to the military, tourists, and foreign investors-have seen the island nation as a feminine place, waiting to embrace those who come to penetrate, protect, mold, and develop, yet conveniently lacking whatever the newcomers claim to possess. Thus feminized, this book contends, the islands and the people have been reinscribed with meanings according to the needs, fears, and desires of outsiders. Authors Kathy E. Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull locate and “excavate” sites of memory, such as cemeteries, memorials, monuments, and museums, to show how the military constructs its gendered narrative upon prior colonial discourses. Among the sites considered are Fort DeRussy, Pearl Harbor, and Punchbowl Cemetery, as well as the practices of citizenship that are produced or foreclosed by the narratives of order and security written upon Hawai’i by the military.This semiotic investigation of ways the military marks Hawai’i necessarily explores the intersection of immigration, colonialism, military expansion, and tourism on the islands. Attending to the ways in which the military represents itself and others represent the military, the authors locate the particular representational elements that both conceal and reveal the military’s presence and power; in doing so, they seek to expand discursive space so that other voices can be heard. ISBN 0-8166-2978-1 Cloth $49.95xxISBN 0-81662979-X Paper $19.95x240 pages 5 7/8 x 9 DecemberBorderlines Series, Volume 10Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

Puerto Rico, Hawai'i, and California share the experiences of conquest and annexation to the United States in the nineteenth century and mass organizational struggles by rural workers in the twentieth. Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW offers a comparative examination of those struggles, which were the era's longest and most protracted campaigns by agricultural workers, supported by organized labor, to establish a collective presence and realize the fruits of democracy.

Dionicio Nodín Valdés examines critical links between the earlier conquests and the later organizing campaigns while he corrects a number of popular misconceptions about agriculture, farmworkers, and organized labor. He shows that agricultural workers have engaged in continuous efforts to gain a place in the institutional life of the nation, that unions succeeded before the United Farm Workers and César Chávez, and that the labor movement played a major role in those efforts. He also offers a window into understanding crucial limitations of institutional democracy in the United States, and demonstrates that the widespread lack of participation in the nation's institutions by agricultural workers has not been due to a lack of volition, but rather to employers' continuous efforts to prevent worker empowerment.

Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW demonstrates how employers benefitted not only from power and wealth, but also from imperialism in both its domestic and international manifestations. It also demonstrates how workers at times successfully overcame growers' advantages, although they were ultimately unable to sustain movements and gain a permanent institutional presence in Puerto Rico and California.