Puerto Rican immigration to Hawaii began when Puerto Rico's sugar industry was devastated by two hurricanes in 1899. The devastation caused a world wide shortage in sugar and a huge demand for the product from Hawaii. Hawaiian sugar plantation owners began to recruit the jobless, but experienced, laborers in Puerto Rico.
Read more about Puerto Rican Immigration To Hawaii: Prelude, First Immigrants, Discrimination By The "Big Five", Struggle For U.S. Citizenship, Struggle Against Discrimination, Puerto Rican Influence, Puerto Ricans in Hawaii, The Puerto Rican "coquí" in Hawaii, Notable Hawaiian-Puerto Ricans
Famous quotes containing the words immigration and/or hawaii:
“I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A fine-looking mill, but no machinery inside.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 1702, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)