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After reviewing field-archive combinations in previous research, I address Madeiran and Azorean migration to Hawaii. I discuss the contrast between the orally-transmitted theme that connects their migration to their familiarity of sugar cane and pineapple growing and what emerges from the archive, which indicates that it occurred in the context of a labor-intensive sugar plantation economy both under indigenous Hawaiian cosmopolitan monarchy and after annexation to the USA. In the end, almost 20,000 Portuguese islanders moved to Hawaii and made society there, shaping one distinct identification and ancestry group, thoroughly addressed by Chicago school sociologists and ethnicity scholars. I conclude suggesting to overcome current limitations in ethnicity/ethnogenesis studies by focusing on the hierarchized dynamics of racialization operated by the plantation system and its labor hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]