On Racial Capitalism, Remaindered Life, Ken Dagiti Ballasiw-Taaw: The Accounts of Ilokano Sakada Recruits to Hawaii in the Essay “Departures” By Priscilla Supnet Macansantos and the Documentary “ the Sakada Series” By Maribel Apuya.

Over the years between 1906-1946, more than 100,000 Filipinos were recruited by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association to work on sugarcane plantations in response to the booming industry and demands. Many of these workers were recruited from the Ilocos region. Sakada, which means unskilled laborers or agricultural workers, were brought by ship and work in exchange for their ship fare. In this paper, we will examine the essay "Departures" written by Priscilla Supnet Macansantos and the documentary "The Sakada Series" by Maribel Apuya using Cedric Robinson's concept of Racial Capitalism, drawing a parallel to the articulation of Neferti X.M. Tadiar of Remaindered Life. The heights of the Global North's extraction of labor from the Global South, as exhibited in the accounts of those surviving Sakadas and their descendants, also rendered them to remake and collectivize themselves, which paved the way for the next generations of the Ilokano diaspora. In tracing the contours of these narratives, we argue in this paper that the accounts of the Sakadas and those Sakada descendants remaking their lives and negotiating their identity to be accepted in a foreign land is their process of becoming and becoming human on what is left for them. Instead of just seeing them as subservient, we position ourselves in evaluating their colonial history with the promise of a better life in migration, using the conceptual frameworks of Cedric Robinson on "Racial Capitalism" and Neferti X.M. Tadiar's "Remaindered Life" as foregrounding frameworks of this paper that traces the personal history of colonialism, feudalism, and racism as backbones for enduring capital for global capitalism.