narrative of immigrant success from one centered on small business entrepreneurship and tight kinship networks in relatively homogenous urban ethnic neighborhoods to one that relied on highly skilled workers and strong business ties within diverse suburban communities.
This version of the American Dream drew upon a prototype adopted by many middle-class Whites after World War II but was distinct.4 It enmeshed the material accoutrements of modern suburban life with the premium that many Asian Americans placed on maintaining their ethnic communities, global ties, and everyday cultural practices. As Dan reflected, it was one that mixed the comforts and conveniences of suburban American life with the robust traditions of social and community life in Asia. As Dan also noted, this dream was not merely a suburban version of Chinatown; it was that of a more cosmopolitan community filled with cultured, educated, and professional people from all corners of the globe.
Asian Americans’ paths to and within Silicon Valley were not paved—they were forged on often inhospitable grounds. Against tough odds, generation upon generation struggled to realize their own aspirations and those of the pioneers who had built the routes that they then followed. Each put another crack in suburbia’s wall of intolerance, making it a more welcoming place for others like them. Their efforts reaffirmed their legitimacy and rights as suburbanites. Yet the terms of their inclusion have long remained open to question. Despite their increasingly robust populations in many valley communities, Asian Americans’ ability to significantly reshape the landscape in accordance with their dreams has been limited.
Asian Americans’ struggles to build their lives and livelihoods in Silicon Valley complicate the singular lens through which the region is often read. Despite nearly a half century of unrivaled immigration and demographic change, the valley is still largely referenced as a breeding ground for invention and entrepreneurship—home to America’s creative class and the birthplace of the digital revolution.5 Some scholars have given attention to Asian Americans’ contributions to the valley’s economy and culture of innovation, but they are all too often left out of the story.6 Moreover, in a place so often measured by the number of startups and venture capitalists, attention to the diverse social and cultural life that Asian Americans have brought to Silicon Valley and the sometimes sobering realities behind their portrait of success have frequently gone unnoticed.
ON THE SUBURBAN SIDELINES (1945–1964)
Asian Americans have deep roots in Silicon Valley, laying claim to the land as early as the mid-1850s. But their claims were consistently challenged by White Californians who disputed Asian Americans’ legal rights as citizens, property holders, and, later, suburbanites. Though sometimes skirting the law and social custom to take up residence in the valley’s countryside and later its growing suburbs, the challenges of living on the social margins kept Asian Americans from enjoying the full benefits of their residence, largely reserved for Whites.
Prior to the 1970s, Silicon Valley was an agricultural region better known as the “Valley of the Heart’s Delight.” Sometimes called the “Prune Capital of the World,” the region was a global headquarters for agricultural production in the early 20th century. Vast fields of apricots, cherries, almonds, peaches, pears, oranges, lemons, apples, cauliflower, grapes, and avocados covered the landscape as far as the eye could see, interrupted only by rolling foothills and San Francisco Bay. By the 1920s, Santa Clara County was the nation’s leading exporter of dried and canned fruit.7 In the 1930s the economy turned more to poultry, flowers, and nurseries, but the valley maintained its qualities as a rural region well into the 1970s.8 Asian Americans were central to the region’s agricultural industries. From the late 1800s, Chinese Americans, mostly from the seafaring province of Guangdong, toiled alongside many Japanese Americans to clear the chaparral for farmland and work in the canneries, packing sheds, and salt mines. Many were employed as laborers to build the San Jose–San Francisco Railway that connected to the transcontinental railroad and transported the valley’s products across the country and around the world.
Prior to 1965, national quotas on Asian immigration, including the various exclusion laws passed between the 1880s and 1920s, prevented the establishment of any large Asian American settlements in Santa Clara Valley or elsewhere. The few Asians who were able to gain admission under the harsh immigration laws that favored European immigrants were largely men who could serve as low-skilled laborers and did not compete with White workers.9 As late as 1960, Asian Americans, largely of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino decent, constituted a mere 0.5% of the U.S. population and little more than 2% of that of Santa Clara County.10
Still, Asian Americans congregated in a few communities around the region. Most lived in San Jose’s Chinatown and Japantown, which were the subject of repeated violence, arson, and displacement. Between the 1850s and 1930s, San Jose’s Chinatown had to be rebuilt five times in different parts of the city.11 Asian Americans also settled in a few communities beyond the San Jose border such as Alviso, which was home to various waves of new immigrants. These outlying communities, however, often lacked even the most basic municipal infrastructure systems such as streetlights and paved roads, which Alviso did not receive until the mid-1950s.12 As the primary target of racial zoning and restrictive land tenure laws in the pre–World War II period, Asian Americans were generally limited to purchasing or renting homes within these areas. Those who did not comply with the formal and informal rules of segregation faced stiff legal penalties and sometimes lethal social consequences.13 Given their legal status and the active threats to their bodies and pocketbooks, only a few settled among the various agricultural communities outside of San Jose.
One agricultural region that attracted a few early Asian American settlers was Washington Township. The township consisted of eight unincorporated communities in Alameda County just north of Santa Clara County—five of which would later come to form the City of Fremont. In the first half of the 1900s, Asian Americans in Washington Township largely worked as tenant farmers, seasonal laborers, and merchants, but few lived in the township permanently. Deed restrictions typically dictated that properties could not be sold to anyone who was not of the “Caucasian race.” Further, alien land laws prevented nearly all Asian immigrants, who had been deemed ineligible for citizenship by federal naturalization policy, from owning land or holding long-term land leases in California until 1952.
Even still, by midcentury the township had a few prominent Japanese American landowning families. In California, such ownership was often made possible by a loophole in land tenure laws that allowed land to be held in the names of Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans who were eligible for American citizenship, rather than their Issei, or first-generation parents. In 1942 Japanese Americans families were forcibly detained in relocation centers, and many lost their land claims and returned to their former homes as tenant farmers and migrants laborers.14 According to the History of the Washington Township, written by the local country club, which was clearly anxious about their presence, Japanese Americans in the township were never “numerous enough to warrant trouble.”15 A small number of families of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, and Hawaiian ancestry, most of whom came among different waves of agricultural workers, could also be found scattered throughout the township (Figure 3). As the central focus of White nativist fervor in prewar California, Asian Americans were, however, excluded from almost every facet of mainstream social and political life.16
FIGURE 3. This class picture from the Irvington Grammar School’s eighth-grade class of 1939 shows Asian Americans’ long roots in Fremont. Six students and one adult pictured here have Japanese last names, and the student in the upper right corner is listed as “unknown.” Image published in Hammond (2003).
The post–World War II period radically reshaped the character of Silicon Valley. As the primary gateway to the Pacific Rim, the nine counties that comprise the Bay Area boomed, swelling in population
