Review: Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City, by Megan Asaka

Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City, by Megan Asaka, is a well-researched, compelling and much-needed study of the largest city in the Pacific Northwest. In this thought-provoking study, Asaka weaves together urban and rural sites as well as numerous minoritized communities to outline both Seattle’s uniqueness and its important place in the larger history of urban development in the United States. In doing so, Asaka successfully pushes against dominant narratives of U.S. urban history that obscure the relevance of Seattle and of the Pacific Northwest more broadly. Seattle from the Margins is an invaluable addition to Pacific Northwest history, immigration history, and the history of urban development in the United States

In the first half of the book, Asaka draws a powerful picture of the western Puget Sound region prior to the city’s development by examining the convergence of colonialism and immigration. Notably, Asaka focuses on the development of violence toward workers of Chinese descent during the late 1800s while entangling this history with the complexities of labor needs and industrial and railroad development shaping Seattle. This portion of the text includes obscured but vital facets of the city’s racial history and of labor in the American West. This includes the ways in which Indigenous women competed with Chinese men in domestic service, while Chinese and Indigenous workers were crucial to the agricultural buildup of the region. Asaka also chronicles periods of violence against people of Chinese descent and a reliance on Indigenous workers in the hop industry thereafter. Such examples speak to larger trends in the book as Asaka skillfully balances the “messiness” of Seattle’s history. As Seattle demonstrates, urban histories do not function along linear and narrow trajectories of development. In this light, Asaka’s focus on rural spaces as crucial to the city’s racial and economic history as well as Seattle’s transnational connections to Asia and British Columbia remain strong contributions of the book.

As Asaka moves her analysis into the 1930s and 1940s during the second half of the book, she continues to weave together the racial, economic, and immigration-focused complexities of Seattle. Her analysis provides a crucial historical examination of the early formation of Seattle’s minoritized and low-income neighborhoods, paying attention to the ways different communities of color often came to live and work side by side. For instance, she details how Filipino migrants, tied to U.S. colonialism, relied upon Japanese-owned spaces of work and socialization as they arrived in the city during the 1920s and 1930s. Moving forward, Asaka examines the varied experiences of minoritized communities as the city government developed “neighborhood clearance” plans and redlining housing policies. Taken together, this complex narrative provides a key window into the messiness and nuance of Seattle’s buildup. Seattle from the Margins ends with a nod to the ways in which industrial and population changes at the hand of WWII transformed the city while bringing upticks in African American migration. However, as Asaka astutely states, “Black workers would find themselves shut out of the highest-paying jobs and restricted from many of the same neighborhoods as previous generations of workers, excluded as well from the vision of postwar prosperity they themselves were helping to build” (p. 186). Thus, as Asaka demonstrates, Seattle remains integral to larger patterns of urban development and racial exclusion in the United States while revealing the ways in which the specific demographics and geographic positioning of Seattle help us understand the entangled histories of colonialism, immigration, and labor in the twentieth-century United States. Finally, Asaka makes a compelling case for the contemporary relevance of Seattle’s history and the continued study of urban spaces through the lens of racial inequality. In this light, Asaka concludes her book stating, “Our current moment of heightened inequality and rampant gentrification underscores the dire need for critical analyses that refuse to romanticize the past. It’s through the routes of the past that we begin to reimagine our past and chart new paths toward more equitable futures” (p. 190).