 to books, books, books, where we discuss reading and writing and everything in between and beyond. I'm your host, Dr. Rita Forsythe, coming to you from Maui on the ThinkTech Network series broadcasting from our studio in downtown Honolulu. The title of today's episode is Between the Sea and Sky. Joining me is Dr. Donna Binkiewicz, professor of American history at Cal State Long Beach. Welcome, Donna. Hi, thanks for having me on. Thanks for being here. Well, now your book, fascinating book, Between the Sea and Sky, the saga of my Portuguese-American family in upcountry Maui, is personal to you, isn't it? You were born and raised on Maui, a descendant of Portuguese immigrants. What inspired you to write the book? Yes, well, for me, it's a very familiar story. But I've found that as I've moved around other places, people are always surprised to hear that I'm from Hawaii and that I'm Portuguese. And they want to know more about how there are Portuguese people in Hawaii and why my ancestors would have moved from islands in the middle of the Atlantic to another set of islands in the middle of the Pacific. And I just wrote the story partly for my own interest, to write about my family history, but also to inform people about the history of Hawaii and a group of people there as immigrants that many people don't know very much about. It's interesting that, like you say, you move from one set of islands to another set of islands. I've never been to the Azores, but that's where your family is from originally. Is that right? Yes, of course. That was several generations back. Fifth generation coming from that first generation that arrived in Hawaii in the early 1880s. And I really appreciate that your book is a mix of history, which we've been talking about, and storytelling, kind of a fictional, non-fictional, historical fiction, multi-generational family story, isn't it? Yes, it ended up being a rather a blend of different kind of writing. I'm a historian by trade, so it certainly is a history, and that was one of the things I wanted to do was write a history of this group. But it also took me in some different directions, in terms of trying to really tell the story in a way that was accessible to a wider reader audience in a way that would attract people's attention to the personal stories. So I really focused on, as I go through the generations, I focused on some of the women who were strong women characters who helped keep the family together and set up the communities here in Hawaii. And I told the story sort of from their perspectives. And I had done a lot of research, of course, on what this experience was like and read lots of great oral histories, many of which came from the University of Hawaii from the Ethnic Studies program there. So even though I'm writing sort of a fictionalized account in some places, I'm putting words in their mouth and I'm bringing them alive. I wanted people to sort of feel what that time was like and what their experiences would have been like. So that's one of the reasons I chose to use some of that creative writing element, as well as the history. Yeah, wonderful. Well, I can't wait to dig deeper into all of those elements, but before we do, I was wondering if you would read a little bit from your book. Sure, let's see. I picked up a little bit of a passage. I'll skip over some of it a little bit, but this is a section of the book that's part of the story that I learned a little bit about while I was doing my research and that's exactly what their arrival on Maui would have been like. So here's the little excerpt of Margarita and her children arriving on Maui. It says here, between 1877 and 1888, over 11,000 Portuguese immigrants arrived in the islands. For Margarita and her children, the view from aboard the small steamer nearing Kahlui Harbor encompassed the Spreckles sugar operations in the heyday of modernizing sugar mill production, rail transport and a harbor extension. Francisco and his brothers took in the scene with awe. Look at that, Antonio, pointed to the steamer puffing from the locomotive as it made its way toward the harbor. Is that where we'll work? He asked Francisco. Perhaps it looks like the sugar mill, he said, but we'll be working in the fields to start. Oh, I would like to see those machines up close and work in the thick of it when I'm able, said Antonio. But then he looked back as the ship kept moving east. Why are we not going to the harbor? Francisco watched as the ship slipped past and they continued sailing east. Soon, sandy beaches slipped by. Rocky shorefronts loomed higher as their vessel moved closer towards the land. The boys watched silently as they slowed near the mouth of a gulch and anchored there. Tall rocky cliffs surrounded by a small rocky beach with a stream entering into it. Out of Malico Bay, rode two small boats to meet them. They weren't heading for this larger Speckles Sugar Company, but farther up the mountain slopes to A and B's expanding plantation. Come on, all of you, the crewmen yelled in Portuguese. Bring your things along, this is it. Who among you can swim? What? Right, Margarita, you mean for us to swim from here? What about the children? And I cannot swim? She, he said, little one ride in the boats, right? Women can get in the boats with them or with the sacks and the men will swim alongside or hang on. Hurry up now. So the passengers gathered their belongings and queued up, some with their eyes wide as they watched the men lower their things into the rowboats that pulled up alongside. Now the ship had stopped and it bobbed up and down in the waves. Salty ocean waters splashed up into the rowboats, also bobbing alongside and not always in unison. Once the men had stacked the bags into the boats, they reached up to help the women and children. Teresa went first, over the side, down the rope ladder and into the arms of the boatmen. She sat on the bags and watched her sister, Moggy, climb over and they looked up to their mother with a mixture of excitement and dread that filled their expressions. Margarita lifted her skirts and slowly made her way down the side of the heaving ship. Her cheeks growing rosy as she released her billowing skirts and her modesty to grasp the ladder more tightly. In her mind, the two minute descent stretched much longer until she too settled in the little boat. I'll skip forward a little bit here. Next came the men. Many of the Portuguese men had learned to swim back in the Azores. Some had been fishermen and sailors themselves. Fewer farmers had taken to the water, though Francisco had. He climbed down, jumped into the sea and swam to the front of the rowboat and hung on. Your turn, Joao. The ocean is warm here, warmer than in Ponte de Costa. He laughed. It'll be like a baptism before entering our new home. Don't be sacrilegious, his mother called. God forgive him his disrespect. And she looked up toward the sky as the other boys followed their brother down. The small rowboat turned toward the shore and with several men swimming along and the waves pushing them forward, it took a little time to approach the beach. The men pulled the boat in close and helped women out. At last they had arrived on Maui. Wow, what an ordeal, what an adventure. So Margarita came without a husband, with all the children? Yes, that's part of the story. It was that her husband had gone off to go and find work and died. So they found, they were left her and her eight children in the Azores of varying ages. But the youngest, not the oldest son, the oldest son I think never arrived in Hawaii. He stayed in San Miguel in the Azores. But the second oldest son was 17 years old at the time. And he's the one who signed on with a sugar contract. And in those days, that would allow them to bring family with them. So he signed up as the contract worker and brought his mother and his siblings. So they all arrived on Maui in 1883 as part of that wave of plantation workers. Unbelievable. Wow, what a story. So tell me the title between the sea and sky. Why that title? I think it captures a few things that the story contains. Number one is, of course, the place where they arrive and they live and set up in their community in Macauau on Maui, which is up the mountain. So people would have seen Haleaka Laws as reaching up to the sky. And of course, they came from the ocean, sailing halfway around the world to arrive in Hawaii. And here they are living right between the shores of Maui and the mountain on the top. So that's the sort of in-between place geographically. But I think also for Margarita, it was between sort of her old life with her husband in San Miguel and what you imagine would someday be her place in heaven with him again. And then the third thing, I think this title kind of captures is the relative place of Portuguese immigrants in the broader sort of ethnic communities because they were, while they were European, they certainly were not considered on par with the Anglo or German Europeans who were running a lot of the plantations and businesses. And yet they were seen as sort of above the Asian workers and the non-white people at the time. So they were what historians call sort of in-between immigrants at that late 19th century period. Well, let's talk more about immigration to the islands. And if we could start with King Kalakaua, during the time, I know you and I had chatted a little bit about this, the population of Hawaii was dropping and the king needed workers. So tell the story of what he did. Yeah, I think the numbers are, you know, something that speak for themselves. If you look at what happens in Hawaii, in the late 19th century, the Hawaiian population is dropping off considerably. So if you look at the time that Captain Cook would have arrived in the islands in the late 1700s, there were nearly 700,000 Hawaiians in the islands. But by 1880, there were only 50,000 left. So that's an enormous drop, right? And is that due to diseases that were brought into the islands? Yes, that was a major factor, right? As Europeans arrived and foreigners brought in with them all kinds of diseases that, you know, native populations had no immunities to. So you had, you know, waves of epidemics and that sort of thing. And they really, you know, diminished the population greatly. So the Hawaiian kingdom was quite worried, right, about what would happen to Hawaii, right? As planters were starting to take off, the sugar industry was starting to take off. And yet the population and the workforce were decreasing. So King Kalakaua went on a tour around the world. In fact, the first monarch, right, to circumnavigate the world on a tour in part to drum up interests in Hawaii and to bring immigrants and settlers. So one of the places he went was Portugal. And that would have been about the time that my great-great-grandmother's husband passed away and they were trying to make some decisions about what to do. So King Kalakaua was instrumental, you know, with his ministers in inviting Portuguese immigrants to come to Hawaii. And of course, many tens of thousands took them up on that. And they stayed. A lot of the people that came over to work, the fields didn't stay, but Portuguese stayed. Why do you think that is? Yeah, well, I think a couple of things. They were invited by Kalakaua, certainly as settlers, not just workers. So he wanted to have a population that would stay, that would help bolster the population of the islands and not have people that just came and went. Many of the other immigrants, and certainly the first big immigrant group before Portuguese were Chinese immigrants who came in to work for the sugar plantations. And a lot of them were young, single men. So they would either intermarry with the Hawaiian population and stay or they would leave. And what Kalakaua wanted was a population that would bring their families and stay, right? And so the Portuguese sort of fit that bill. And they were interested because, you know, there was a lot of poverty in the Azores at that time. A lot of them were farmers. They had some blights on their crops and people were having a really difficult time in the Azores. So this was an opportunity, right, to find another way and go somewhere else, start over. I think many of them had hopes of maybe someday having their own farms. And this was really a way to do that. Oh, I see. So they came over on the sugar contracts, but did a lot of them move into pineapple cultivation also? Eventually, I would say this is one of the things I found surprising too when I was writing the book and doing my research is, you know, I did all this research about the sugar plantations and I certainly used that because that's where they started. But in my family, certainly many of the men only served their three years. And then they went off and did their own home farms or ranches. And again, this was in part due to King Kalakaua and then Queen Lillio Kalani, who wanted to encourage settlement. So one of the ways that they did this was to allow people to get land. And of course that varied quite a bit. Most of the land was already taken up by the plantations, right? So a lot of the good farmable land was not available, but they would allow people to homestead, essentially in properties in this case on Maui up the mountain. And what I found out in my family was that people did do that. They went off, kind of pooled their resources, purchased a homestead and they would get cheaper land that was up on the mountain that was forested because it was forested, it was cheaper. So they would chop down the trees, clear the land for their own farms and they became wood purveyors, right? Selling wood to the plantations so they could use it for the boilers. Oh, oh my goodness. Wasn't that about the time of the new deal and people were also finding- That would come later. A little later. I mean, that was another element that I found was you come down in the generations, a couple of generations down. There were other kinds of work that came along. So first they sort of set up their own home farms and they grew all kinds of different crops, meant much of what they would have used on their own home for their families, but they also sold goods and traded with the local stores. And this is where the pineapple comes in since you had mentioned that. Pineapple, it was just starting to take off in the 1890s, 1900, right? So one of the things that happened up country is a lot of the local people started to grow their own pineapple plots and they would sell a pineapple to the canneries. And as long as pineapple was doing really well, which it was in the 1910s, 1920s, everyone did really well with that. And then when they hit the Great Depression in the 1930s, the planters and the plantation canneries stopped buying their pineapples. They would only use the pineapples from their own fields. So a lot of these people went bankrupt and had to go and do something else. In fact, so two things happened. One is a lot of local people left the islands or at least left Maui and went to Honolulu to look for other jobs. Or people who had been working at the pineapple cannery left to go to Honolulu to work for the dole cannery because that one was still going. So you see this sort of movement of population. It's also a time period when many Portuguese begin to leave the islands and come to California. So in the 1920s, 1910s. But in the 1930s, when the Great Depression hits, a lot of people have lost their pineapple farms and are really sort of struggling again with poverty and lack of jobs. The New Deal comes along. And a lot of these young men, especially in the upcountry areas, get hired to work for the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, that hired young men to work in national park areas and forests. So a lot of these young men went off and worked in Haleakwa. They built the trails, right? And they built the visitor center buildings. And they planted trees. And there were so many projects on Maui. I was really surprised to see how much was going on in that period. So it was really fascinating reading about what was going on up the mountain. But they were also building roads, right? They helped to build a road going up the mountain. They helped to build a Pinae airport. And many of the little roads and bridges all around the island came from that New Deal period. I wonder if some of the Hana Highway... I'm sure. Yes. Looked like they kind of came from that era. Exactly. And then I've heard that the Portuguese women were fantastic midwives. Yes, that was one of the things too. My great-grandmother was a well-known midwife in Markowale and she became someone who served the community in that way. And I think, again, that's a part of the story I wanted to tell in this book because people sometimes forget about the women and the work that they did, not on the plantations, of course, but in the communities, right? And a midwife was an important role for the community, literally sort of bringing the babies along. And doing other kinds of sort of healing work as well. Back in those days, the midwife used to go to the family and stay with them for a week, right? And take care of the baby and the mother and cook the food and do all kinds of things for them. So... Well, yeah. Her mother was always gone with everybody else's children. Oh, yeah. Well, it sounds like the women made a great contribution to Maui's growth. Yes, literally. And recipes. Your book has Portuguese recipes in there. Oh, my gosh, that was exciting. Yes, you know, as I'm writing about the families and the family stories, certainly food is part of that, part of that culture that Portuguese brought to Hawaii. So I had to put some recipes in there so you can find things like fingerdolls, pot roast and malasadas and Portuguese bean soup and the staples of the Portuguese community. Oh, my favorites, yeah. I'm not Portuguese, but I love Portuguese food. You know, we have a beautiful church of country, the Holy Ghost Church. Yes. It's just such a beautiful, unique. Isn't it like an octagon? It is. It's a unique church. It's an octagon shape. It was built, again, by a Portuguese community in Kula. In fact, all the churches kind of up country, from Kua'au to Pa'ia to Haiku, Maka'au, and then Kula. Those were all originally little Portuguese churches. And in Kula, in particular, you really see the legacy of that because you can go into that church today and they still have the Portuguese stations of the cross on walls. And you know, those, you know, if you imagine in those days, these poor immigrant communities trying to raising money, right, they sold sweet bread and they had cattle auctions and they did all that kind of things to raise the money to purchase and ship those stations of the cross and materials for the church from Europe, you know, to the islands. Amazing. I love your book. We can find it on Amazon and it's also at the Maui Sugar Museum. Yes. Shout out to your sister for that cover art. That is gorgeous. Thank you. Yes, this book is a family affair. I recruited my sister to do that little image for me and put that on the cover of the book and I think it captures that look, right, of up country looking up towards the mountain. Yeah. And a lot of the really old homes in Maka'au always had those big pine trees next to them. So you could see where all the houses were. I think those are those Captain Cook trees. Captain Cook pines or something. I don't know. I'm not sure about that. You're either. And I'm very proud of you for self-publishing the book. That's an accomplishment. Thank you. Yes, I was finishing the book up right as the pandemic was taking off and it was a sort of difficult time to reach out to publishers. But it's also, it's not a traditional academic book, you know, as my first book was. So I thought, you know, I'll try to do something a little different with this and, you know, I went and did the self-publishing, basically had a lot of freedom to kind of do what I wanted and how to put the book together myself and, you know, and bring in my sister as the artist. And in fact, my son who did the little map of Maui for me, that's also in the book. And nowadays we have access to, you know, this self-publishing venue. I mean, there's certainly many of them, but you know, Amazon is probably one of the better known and easily accessible. It's one of the reasons I chose that. But it gave me an opportunity to do something a little different, like I said, which is both a blend of history and sort of creative non-fiction. Wonderful. What did I not cover? What did I forget to ask? What is there anything else before we go? Well, the only other thing I would say is, you know, the book, like I said, it kind of captures the history of the Portuguese and their arrival and the voyage itself, which I think is an incredible voyage halfway around the world. I can't imagine doing that myself, let alone back then. But, you know, the things I really wanted to cover were the fact that the Portuguese came and helped set up, you know, the sort of small farm upcountry areas, right, that we know as upcountry areas today, that they helped bring their Portuguese traditions and their Catholicism with them to the islands and that they helped establish a more diversified agriculture, right, so not just sugar and pineapples, but other things as well. Oh, very good. Well, that's all the time we have today. I want to thank Dr. Binkiewicz for being my special guest, our broadcast engineer, our floor manager, and Jay Fidel, our executive producer, a special mahalo to our underwriters and thank you for joining us. Books, books, books will be back in two weeks. Until then, read, write, and create your world. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.