Slaves have names too National Museum of American History

A falsified passport used to smuggle garment slaves from Thailand to the United States. (National Museum of American History)

They didn’t recognize their names. None of them did. Not The New York Times, not The Los Angeles Times, not the countless newscasters who covered the story on the evening news. It was the biggest sweatshop bust in America that anyone could remember. Back then, a lot of people didn’t even know what a sweatshop was. But 72 workers who had been smuggled from Thailand were found in one in El Monte, California.

Found. Like the police just happened to stumble upon a warehouse wrapped in barbed wire and stuffed with almost a hundred people operating sewing machines for eighteen hours a day with no pay. Like a couple of the workers hadn’t escaped and informed authorities about what they had been through. How they had met someone in Bangkok who told them that the jobs they had were decent, but that in California there were longer lunch breaks, and more spectacular holidays, and certainly enough of a pay hike to send money back home. No, they were simply found, and then liberated. People were arrested. Businesses awaited scandal. We all wanted names. Just not their names.

Courtroom sketches of defendants listening to court proceedings in United States v. Manasurangkun, 1995. (National Museum of American History)

We wanted the names of the crime bosses – the fatcats who sat from their offices and glared at their stolen workforce, a labyrinth of fingers stitching t-shirts and cardigans. The papers printed articles that mentioned names like “Mr. Big” and “Auntie,” as if the fact that dozens of slaves had been brought to America without anyone knowing wasn’t unbelievable enough. Eventually, we found out that the culprits weren’t mobsters or high-rollers with political ties or anything like that. Just other people from Thailand, operating under the company name SK Fashions, who were all going to jail for six years – about as long as some of their slaves had been held captive.

Entitled “Sweatshop,” this George Biddle painting from 1935 depicts garment sweatshops in the early 20th Century. (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

We wanted the names of the companies to blame. Partly because we wanted to hold our American corporations accountable, but mostly because we wanted to make sure that when the reporter listed them, they weren’t the ones on the labels in our closests. Because discovering that you bought from a company that exploited slaves would feel terrible, but also because finding out that all of your gear was sweatshop-free would be a relief.

We wanted to make sure that the name of the town was El Monte, so that we could breathe easy that we didn’t live there. That we didn’t live in a town like that, with a history of lynching and West Coast sympathy for the Confederacy. That it probably only got away with this sort of thing because it was so close to Mexico, the name of another place where we didn’t live.

This engraving depicts prisoners of the African slave trade captured by H.M.S. Undine. (National Anthropological Archives)

Those were the names we wanted to know, but not the names of the slaves. We never want to know the names of the slaves. Because “slaves” is a monolith that can be easily conceptualized and narrated and understood. Slaves had built America a long time ago. Slaves were treated poorly. Slaves were freed. Slaves were from long ago, and they didn’t have names unless they were profound like Fredrick Douglass or Sojourner Truth, or revolutionary like Nat Turner or Moses. And so in 1995, they were simply called “the El Monte workers.” Even though the press didn’t give them names, they gave them a brand.

Courtroom sketches of three former El Monte sweatshop workers testifying in United States v. Manasurangkun, 1995. (National Museum of American History)

But the slaves did have names. And families who saw them off at the airport, and told them to try an American hamburger, and to watch a basketball game, and to send a postcard from Disneyland because El Monte is so close by. The slaves heard cars driving past the factory, blasting Tupac or Prince or Alanis Morisette from their speakers, drivers unaware that a cage for humans operated east of Hollywood. The slaves were once not slaves, or sweatshop workers, or defined by what they did for some or no money in the first place. The slaves had names, likes slaves have always had.

This mixed-media sculpture by Dr. Charles Smith is called “Escape.” It pays tribute to Kunta Kente, a fictional slave from Alex Haley’s novel Roots. (Anacostia Community Museum)

So let’s recognize Chuai Ngan, who would have risked everything for freedom, except the lives of her family, who her captors promised to go after if she were to escape. Let’s remember Khaek, who swore that she wouldn’t tell anyone about the stale factory walls, and the bolted doors, and the dorms packed with sixteen people each, if they just let her go back to Thailand. Let’s recognize Win Chuai Ngan, who was one of the only prisoners allowed to go outside to throw away the trash, because he’s a man. And how he tore the number of a Thai temple from a newspaper in the dumpster, and risked his life to hop the fence for a phone booth. And how he didn’t want to leave his name for the police, because as bad as slavery was, deportation might be worse. Let’s recognize Maliwan Clinton, who, after finally receiving U.S. citizenship in 2008, proclaimed, “I’m an American and this is my home now!”

So although this story ends happily (at least as happily as slavery stories can end) let’s recognize that factories like this still exist. That some industries still operate with forced labor at the bottom of their chain of command. That although slavery as an American institution is over, the abolitionists and revolts, the closing of slave ships and plantations, the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery as we seem to know it – all of that doesn’t mean as much if you’re a slave who lives and works and dreams of freedom today.

This sewing machine, seized from the El Monte sweatshop raid in 1995, is on display by the Constitution Avenue entrance of the National Museum of American History.

A sewing machine seized from the El Monte sweatshop sting is on display by the Independence Avenue entrance of the National Museum of American History. It was included in the 1997 exhibition, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A History of American Sweatshops, 1820 – Present.

Special thanks to The Los Angeles Times which, 13 years later, recognized their names.

Learn more about modern slavery and how it affects you at SlaveryFootprint.org.