become a popular meeting ground for successful young Asian Americans. Along with many other Silicon Valley suburbs, Fremont ranked among the wealthiest municipalities in the country, and among the city’s residents, Asian Americans were some of the most prosperous. In 2014, the American Community Survey estimated the median income of Asian Americans in Fremont to be nearly $125,000, compared to around $100,000 for the city as a whole.101 Asian American newcomers congregated in some of Fremont’s most prestigious neighborhoods, including Avalon, the 275-home gated community in which Timothy and Doreen lived and where homes regularly sold for upwards of $2 million (Figure 5).102
FIGURE 5. Inside the Avalon, one of Fremont’s gated communities, signs of Asian Americans’ presence are readily apparent in many homes. Photo by author.
Fremont had become popular not only among Asian Americans working in high tech but also for high-tech businesses, especially those run by Asian Americans. Between 1990 and 2000, around 1,200 high-tech firms set up shop in Fremont.103 According to former mayor Bob Wasserman, before the tech crash in 2000, the city had more high-tech headquarters than San Francisco.104 That same year, it was also reportedly the most popular city in the United States for Taiwanese high-tech companies, with over 100 firms with connections to Taiwan.105 Like many before them, companies that were relocating or expanding their operations from overseas found advantage in Fremont’s inexpensive industrial and warehouse space and strategic location within Silicon Valley. Increasingly, they were also attracted to the city’s easy access to emerging Pacific Rim high-tech hubs and its growing population of highly skilled immigrants. To locate where the technology startups are the thickest, wrote Mark Hendricks, a writer for a blog run by American Express®, “Go west, young entrepreneur. When you reach Fremont, California, you’re there.” In 2012, the credit card giant reported that Fremont had more than 21 technology startups for every 100,000 people—a ratio that was nearly as much as the next three cities combined.106
By 2010, the transformation of Silicon Valley from a landscape of cauliflower fields and White working- and middle-class suburban communities to the hub of Asian American life in northern California was complete. Nearly a half century of immigration had transformed once-fledgling Asian American destinations into mature immigrant gateways (Maps 2 and 3).
MAP 2. In 1980, Asian Americans could be found in limited numbers throughout many Silicon Valley communities. Image by the author.
MAP 3. By 2010, the Asian American population in Silicon Valley exploded. Chinese Americans and Indian Americans, who tend to be employed as scientists and engineers in the valley, made up the bulk of new migrants, particularly in the region’s middle-class suburbs such as Fremont. Image by author.
Between 2000 and 2010, while Santa Clara County’s Asian American population grew by 140,000 to over 565,000, San Francisco County added only 28,000 new Asian American residents, with a population totaling less than half that of Santa Clara. By 2010, Santa Clara County had also eclipsed San Francisco in its percentage of foreign-born residents, 37% to 36%. As historian Margaret O’Mara observed, the rise of Silicon Valley resulted in a pattern of residents moving from the “suburbs in which they live to the suburbs in which they work.”107 For a new generation of middle-class Asian Americans, the suburbs were the only America they knew or needed.
This new geography widened generational and ethnic divides among Asian Americans. Among Chinese Americans, while earlier generations of immigrants tended to concentrate in relatively poor urban enclaves, speak Cantonese, and hail from Hong Kong or China’s Guangdong Province, latter generations tended to live in middle-class Silicon Valley suburbs, speak Mandarin and fluent English, and come from major urban centers in Taiwan and mainland China. These two groups coexist but with very little social or professional interaction.108 Whereas Asian Americans’ social isolation in suburbia once led them to find common cause with their urban counterparts, the geographic and social distance between generations increased the chasm to a gulf. While San Francisco and Oakland Chinatowns struggled to survive amid a long process of bleeding businesses and residents to the suburbs, Silicon Valley suburbs thrived as destinations for young professionals who had a far different sense of what it was to be Asian American.
The emergence of middle-class Silicon Valley suburbs such as Fremont also increasingly separated Asian Americans from African Americans and Latinos, who had not suburbanized at the same rates. When they did, these groups tended to live in more working-class suburbs farther from the Silicon Valley core. By 2010, African Americans comprised 3% and Latinos about 15% of Fremont’s population. Asian Americans were learning to build community in more diverse neighborhoods than many had left behind in Bay Area urban centers and the countries from which they hailed, and certainly more so than the waves of White Americans who had moved to the suburbs before them. But their suburban communities were also more diverse ethnically than racially and more so racially than economically. The diversity that had come to characterize Silicon Valley softened the racial and class lines that had once defined cities and suburbs but, at the same time, also signaled the creation of more complex spatial and social geographies within suburbia.
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The path to the New Gold Mountain, like the old, has been littered with stumbling blocks and stop signs. Prior to 1965, Asian Americans’ struggles in Silicon Valley were defined primarily by their efforts to find permanence and avoid the threat of displacement. They toiled on the land, seeking through their labor to legitimate their claims to it. But they were constantly threatened by their tenuous legal status as citizens and property owners. For civil rights–era Asian Americans, hard-won battles settled many legal questions, but their status as suburbanites was still widely questioned. They lived in constant tension with neighbors who openly fought for communities that did not include them. Excluded from one suburban dream, Asian Americans began to carve out another.
It was not until the birth of high-tech industry in Santa Clara Valley that Asian Americans’ claims to the region finally seemed settled. Among this generation, their challenge was to build homes and communities in suburbs that had not yet established a comfortable place for people like them. They did so at a time of great dynamism, when waves of immigrants with little resemblance to those who had come in previous decades were flooding into the region. More likely upwardly mobile, educated, and professional, these migrants brought their own American Dream with them. Together they started restaurants, travel companies, banks, real estate firms, language schools, ethnic newspapers, and cultural and religious institutions. This generation was no longer fighting for suburbia; they were building it anew.
Today, Asian Americans are moving into Silicon Valley suburbs in which they are in the majority and where the landscape is beginning to affirm their desired lifestyles. Chinese and Indian Americans now dominate the engineering and research sector of high-tech firms, and many have broken through the infamous “bamboo ceiling” to enter positions in management and launch their own firms.109 Shopping malls, restaurants, and stores catering to the needs and desires of Asian Americans abound. Asian American students are in the majority at many of the region’s top-performing schools. They now live in some of the valley’s most exclusive neighborhoods and, in general, feel far less pressure than previous generations to shed their ethnic identities and customs during their move to the suburbs.110
Asian Americans’ inclusion in suburban life, however, has never been on equal terms to that of White Americans, nor has it been complete.111
