No Separate Peace by Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda

No Separate Peace by Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda

From cannery to construction site, workers forged solidarity in shared struggles



Across the Pacific Northwest in the late twentieth century, Black construction workers, Filipino cannery workers, and a wide network of community activists built a bold experiment in multiracial labor organizing. No Separate Peace tells the story of this movement and the political vision that sustained it: solidarity forged in struggle against racial capitalism, imperial power, and workplace exploitation.



Beginning in the early 1970s, activists in Seattle and Alaska created a worker-governed legal office, organized campaigns against discrimination and corruption, and built grassroots alliances linking labor struggles to global movements for liberation. These organizers insisted that solidarity was not a slogan or aspiration but a demanding political practice--one that required sustained collaboration across racial, national, and organizational boundaries.



Drawing on oral histories, activist archives, and movement newspapers, Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda traces how Black and Filipino workers developed shared strategies of organizing while confronting the pressures of neoliberal economic restructuring, state repression, and internal debates within labor movements. Their collaborations produced new infrastructures of solidarity, connecting local organizing in the Pacific Northwest to decolonial struggles across the world.



By placing workers of color at the center of a global history of activism, No Separate Peace offers a powerful account of how solidarity is collectively built through the labor of shared struggle.

Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda is associate professor of history at California State University, East Bay.