Kalihi, the working-class neighborhood you are now in, is in many ways the truest living museum of Hawaii's plantation-era immigration history. Beginning in the 1850s, the sugar industry — desperate for cheap labor after the Hawaiian population had collapsed from disease and after Chinese workers began leaving the plantations — turned to a series of other countries for its workforce. Portuguese workers arrived in 1878 from the Azores and Madeira islands, bringing with them a small, four-string instrument called the braguinha that would, in Hawaiian hands, become the 'ukulele.
Japanese laborers recruited under the Meiji government's emigration program arrived in large numbers beginning in the 1880s and by 1900 constituted the single largest ethnic group in Hawaii. Filipino workers, called Sakadas, began arriving in 1906 and continued through the 1940s. Korean immigrants came in significant numbers between 1903 and 1905.
Puerto Rican workers arrived after 1900. All of these communities settled in Kalihi and the surrounding neighborhoods, establishing temples, churches, schools, shops, and social clubs that maintained their home cultures while slowly building something new: the multicultural local identity of modern Hawaii. Walking Kalihi's streets today, you encounter that entire history — still alive, still in conversation with itself.