Abstract
Over the past decade, one might be forgiven for thinking that Silicon Valley shapes life not only in America, but globally. Twitter, Instagram, and numerous other forms of social media have created new economies, politics, and experiences, literally carving out, if not an alternate reality, a parallel digital infrastructure that transcends national borders.
Popular culture has propelled this narrative. Though hardly laudatory, the David Fincher film, The Social Network critiqued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, but also inadvertently humanized him more than the tech pioneer was able to do independently. Similarly, the HBO series Silicon Valley simultaneously parodies and celebrates the South Bay local.
The region’s built environment has proven almost equally influential in terms of suburban design and metropolitan economic development. Along with Disneyland, Arizona’s Sun City, and the Seattle Center, Silicon Valley’s Stanford Industrial Park (SIP) “helped to define a new standard for what was normal on the American cityscape,” notes historian John Findlay. 1 Its placid suburban aesthetic embodying the white collar, striving middle-class racially homogenous normative of the post-1945 “good life.”
The partnership that arose between Stanford University and the growing tech industry dramatically raised the university’s profile and led other municipalities in the United States and elsewhere to emulate the SIP/Silicon Valley model. High-tech growth became “city building,” writes University of Washington historian Margaret O’Mara in Cities of Knowledge. The suburbanization of science in the late-twentieth century helped to urbanize American suburbs by making these places closer to classic definitions of cities in terms of their economic diversity and self-sufficiency (p. 4). In more recent work, O’Mara explores the international ramifications of this influence as tech enclaves in Japan, Bangladesh, and Singapore have sought to replicate the South Bay’s success. 2
Yet, the history of Silicon Valley from its suburban environs to its urban San Jose core reflects a past that challenges many of these assumptions. Women and minorities have long been at the heart of economic growth in the region; transnational connections and labor, though often exploited, are eternally critical to the Valley’s profitability, federal policies, and funding rather than pure entrepreneurial genius, the lifeblood of its post–World War II ascendency. The three works discussed here by O’Mara, Willow Lung-Amam, and Stephen Pitti all explore the region’s history and the on-the-ground realities of Silicon Valley for residents and beyond.
In The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans, Pitti traces the history of San Jose and its surrounding areas back to initial contact between European and indigenous peoples through the rise of the tech industry in the late-twentieth century. The Yale University professor works against long-standing historical tropes regarding Silicon Valley, writing, “a sort of counter history . . . that runs against common myths about the Valley’s development” (p. 1). In particular, Pitti draws attention to the ignored, but critical contributions to the region’s development made by Latinos despite facing widespread economic and political discrimination.
Violence by Spanish settlers toward native peoples such as the Yóscolos defined the region’s early existence. Mexican independence did little to dislodge bloodshed from local reality as Indian revolts flared. Later, Mexicans and other minorities would be under the thumb of white Americans clamoring for the fortunes of the Gold Rush and impending statehood. Even prior to the discovery of precious minerals, American trappers moved into the Valley raising the collective anxieties of ethnic Mexicans who now endured a dual threat “by both Indians and white settlers” ushering in an era of violence that left Californios, the term used by long-tenured ethnic Mexican residents of the new U.S. state, reeling (p. 29).
Exploited low-wage labor exists as a feature rather than a bug of the Valley’s development. Oppressed under both colonial Spain and independent Mexico, indigenous peoples provided critical labor to the developing region. Later, ethnic Mexican workers served as a vital work force in the mines of New Almaden where miners extracted mercury from the earth leaving their health vulnerable to industrial accidents and mercury poisoning.
Environmental dangers were not confined to the mines; mercury and other toxins leaked into the ground subjecting ethnic Mexican residents of the local colonia—a residential enclave often located on more marginal lands and populated by residents of Mexican descent—known as Spanishtown to illness, disease, and environmental degradation.
During the late-twentieth century, boosters sold the booming consumer technology economy as a “clean industry.” The reality, however, proved more complicated. During the 1960s, one resident wrote to the Palo Alto Times, lamenting how “disconcerting” it was “to have a federal agent pick leaves from our shrubs once a month, to test them for radioactivity” (O’Mara, 134). By the late 1980s, Santa Clara County contained nineteen superfund sites, the most in the nation. 3
Much like their Spanishtown predecessors, low-wage workers producing circuit boards, semi-conductors, and other technology components frequently plied their trade amidst dangerous work conditions, lived in more remote areas of the Valley due to racial discrimination and economic factors, and, often, resided in closer proximity to polluted land. Nor could they find access to better housing, as Lung-Amam points out, numerous suburbs passed zoning laws that prevented the placement of manufacturing industries tied to tech, thereby excluding workers from these municipalities due to distance and cost.
By the early-twentieth century, agriculture became the lodestar of economic development in and around San Jose. Ethnic Mexicans were drawn to the city for work. The influx of Mexican nationals, due to employment opportunities and political unrest in Mexico, led to the establishment of East San Jose as the local barrio.
Residents began to construct civil society by establishing mutual aid societies and similar cultural institutions to aid locals. Some organizations adopted a transnational awareness connecting ethnic Mexicans to a larger diaspora, Mexican de afuera or “Mexico outside the nation.” Others such as the Community Service Organization downplayed these affiliations focusing on life in the Valley. Whatever an organization’s transnational leanings, capital flows by individuals held steady. Workers frequently remitted pay to other ethnic Mexican communities in the United States and Mexico. East San Jose “was a community that spanned state and international boundaries, and new roots in the segregated Valley did not mean the abandonment of far flung relationships,” writes Pitti (p. 93).
By the mid-twentieth century, San Jose was one of the largest enclaves of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans in the state, but they found little affordable housing outside of the Eastside. Beginning in the 1920s and extending well past the 1940s, restrictive covenants gained currency in the area, thereby exacerbating segregation and housing issues plaguing East San Jose.
The labor of ethnic Mexicans in the fields contributed mightily to the Valley’s place as the prune capital of the world. Canneries also arose, which provided employment to European immigrant women, mostly Portuguese and Italian and, after World War II as whites left cannery work for better jobs in industry, Latinas. According to Glenna Matthews, the economic and political benefits this labor afforded for women exceeded those that followed when the fruit industry collapsed and the tech industry took off during the 1970s. 4
With some exceptions such as Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) and later, a vibrant, Community Services Organization (CSO), organized labor largely ignored ethnic Mexican labor even as the agricultural labor force became “latinized” (Pitti, 82). In contrast, European immigrants, largely from Italy and Portugal, benefited greatly from unionization by providing them with greater “job stability and more earning power” which enabled them to ascend to the middle class. 5
As evidenced by court decisions in the mid-1970s, rather than breaking from tradition, organized labor continued to discriminate against Latino workers in agriculture well into the late-twentieth century. 6 More generally, union organization throughout the Valley after 1945, even with the successes of the United Farm Workers, delivered only modest gains among Latinas laboring in canneries. Similar dynamics arose during the 1970s when semi-conductor production exploded and the region’s fruit industry faltered. Asian and Latina women emerged as the primary labor force in what Matthews describes as “a new working class in the Valley” producing the requisite pieces of consumer technology. 7 The Valley’s working-class transnational connections now included East and Southeast Asia as well as Latin America which was not entirely new as Filipino and Japanese workers worked in the fields alongside their Mexican and Mexican American counterparts during the 1920s.
World War II and its aftermath brought numerous economic and political changes nationally, but especially for Silicon Valley. Government spending on the military and the adjacent military industrial complex shifted west particularly to California. With the rise of a more technologically advanced military, the threat of nuclear conflict, and Cold War competition, a new emphasis on scientific research emerged. This intersection of forces helped to construct what Margaret O’Mara labeled in the title of her 1992 work, Cities of Knowledge.
Worries about locating industry in potentially “vulnerable cities” led to the Truman administration’s emphasis on “industrial dispersion” favoring decentralization, which many equated with suburbia. Such policies coincided with wide-scale suburbanization, which also had been facilitated by government intervention, including the creation of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Veterans Administration loans, and national highway construction. High-tech growth functioned as economic development or “city building.”
Following World War II, Stanford University did not occupy the place in American higher education and popular culture that it does today. Instead, it emerged at mid-century as an “underprivileged institution” (O’Mara, 108). Benefiting from its location in Silicon Valley, the area’s relatively homogenous demographics, and access to undeveloped land under its stewardship, the university embarked on a three-pronged approach to alter its status.
The Stanford strategy entailed the construction of high-end housing for its workers and their families, a regional supermarket attending to their postwar consumerist needs and the creation of an industrial park for scientific research. Hardly the first of its kind, SIP (later Stanford Research Park, SRP) was the first to utilize a local university as a central partner in its development, a feat that in ensuing decades would often be imitated by other localities but never replicated.
Federal policies such as creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950 and the Housing Act of 1959 also contributed to Silicon Valley’s cultural weight. The NSF’s mandate required the establishment of a national program for research and education that also supported “specific defense research activities” (O’Mara, 45). The 1959 legislation carved out funding for universities and colleges to pursue urban renewal. Even before the housing act, research parks boomed from thirty-three in 1940 to 302 in 1957; from 1945 to 1955, three-fourths of research parks would be located in cities between twenty-five thousand and five-hundred thousand (O’Mara, 64).
The media lionized scientists and other white-collar professionals “as people of exceptional creative capabilities,” much as it does tech entrepreneurs today. Yet, the Valley grew rich not from a booming technology and consumer market helmed by business-savvy programming savants, but rather federal defense contracts divvied out by a faceless bureaucracy. An ironic starting point for an industry and a university that long eschewed government intervention and celebrated a libertarian technocratic ideal more broadly yet found “fame and fortune” while fostering “hundreds of fledging entrepreneurs in their work” through federal spending (O’Mara, 109). On a more fundamental level, Northern California’s militarization not only brought dollars but also people and talent without which the “miracle of Palo Alto” might have failed (O’Mara, 98).
The proliferation of research parks paralleled the boom in suburbanization and Silicon Valley’s embrace of California style, low-density architecture helped to popularize the form and cement it in the minds of policymakers, planners, and the public such that “The ideal, location, really was a suburb” (O’Mara, 39). Research parks designed along this model managed to bridge both the layout of college campus and residential suburbs.
Of course, this also furthered the anti-urban bias of the period. Moreover, while suburbs and municipalities attempted to imitate the Silicon Valley/Stanford model, cities such as Philadelphia struggled to emulate Silicon Valley’s success as urban schools often had to depend heavily on urban renewal for new land to develop while class and race issues which Stanford’s relative isolation enabled it to avoid, bedeviled administrators elsewhere. “Part of what made the ‘city of knowledge’ on the Peninsula so desirable to professional workers and employers during the time of racial change and social upheaval was its whiteness,” observes O’Mara (O’Mara, 131).
Not all federal policies that benefited Silicon Valley stemmed from federal funding. Wars in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam opened new avenues of immigration to the United States. Though meant to facilitate European immigration, the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 facilitated greater migration from Asia to the United States and many newcomers took up work in Silicon Valley. When semi-conductor production expanded in the 1970s, Filipinas and other Asian and Asian American women gained footholds in the industry.
Not only working-class immigrants found a home in Silicon Valley but also professionals largely from East and South Asia, especially China and India. Economically well-off and at the forefront of technological innovation, these engineers, scientists, and managers sought much the same environs for their families as white professionals. It is this cohort that serves as the subject of the University of Maryland’s Lung-Amam’s Trespassers? While Lung-Amam acknowledges that more than half of the San Jose’s 152,000 Asian American residents labor in the tech industry’s low-wage manufacturing sector, they are not the central focus of her work.
In many ways, Tresspassers serves as culmination of the processes examined by Pitti and O’Mara: the intersection of Cold War politics, urban renewal/suburbanization, racial difference, and military expansion. By 2012, eighteen of the twenty U.S. cities with the highest proportion of Asian American residents were suburbs and seven of these eighteen were located in Silicon Valley. During the Cold War, Americans concerned about international prestige, particularly in regard to Asia, and communist advances there advocated for the integration of Asians and Asian Americans into suburbia. Californians especially took notice due to their Asian and Asian American populations. 8
Yet, there remains a catch. The “foreignness” that once justified Asian exclusion, manifested in alien land laws and numerous immigrant restrictions dating back to the late-nineteenth century, now advocated for their inclusion. 9 However, the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype remained embedded in this relationship: grudgingly accepted due to transnational concerns, but not embraced due to domestic prejudices.
With both suburbanization and urban renewal apace, one can see how Lung-Amam’s study of predominantly Asian American suburbs such as Fremont and Mission San Jose represent the apotheosis of these forces. Though well-off white-collar professionals, Asian Americans have found traversing suburbia difficult even as they “have marked and crafted their suburban sense of place” making it their own (Lung-Amam, 4-5).
As Lung-Amam demonstrates, though suburbanites of Asian descent have proliferated, their status due to the persistence of long-held stereotypes continues to undermine their integration into local communities. “The forms and uses of schools, shopping malls, and homes that Asian American newcomers inspired became markers of their seeming failure to integrate with and conform to their new environment,” writes Lung-Amam (p. 7). City planners decry the rise of Asian shopping malls for fear of ghettoizing the suburb as Asian and instead pine for a Whole Foods. White parents of schoolchildren bemoan the greater attention and intensity devoted to schooling brought by Asian American families. The latter understanding the need to be twice as good when compared with their white counterparts to succeed academically and professionally. Still Lung-Amam stresses that such conflicts represent progress: “This generation was no longer fighting for suburbia; they were building it anew” (p. 51).
Lung-Amam also rejects formulations that positions Asian Americans—due to economic status, educational levels, and politics—as “the new whites” while demonstrating how debates over retail economic development, schools, and housing reflect the aforementioned transactional acceptance granted Asian Americans. The dogged persistence of housing segregation largely excludes San Jose’s Mexican American and African American populations.
Juxtaposing the arguments of the three authors and the history of Silicon Valley, one can draw upon the conclusion that Mark Brilliant and others have made in regard to race and the attainment of equality: “different axes of discrimination . . . necessitated different avenues of redress.” 10 For the San Jose Mexican American community in the twentieth century, discrimination meant confinement to the Eastside and denial of access to upper level employment in the tech industry. For Asian Americans, it is political fights over school culture, housing styles, and Asian markets.
Though African Americans are acknowledged in each work, they go largely unexplored. Generally, in California history, Latinos and Asian Americans, though encountering significant levels of discrimination, have found entry into American suburbs at higher rates than their black counterparts. This is also true in Silicon Valley. 11
Workers of East and South Asian descent have reshaped the Valley’s suburbs. From 2000 to 2010, the Asian American population in Santa Clara County increased by 32 percent. Fremont alone transformed into one of the nation’s most notable “ethnoburbs” gaining shorthand monikers like “Little Taiwan” and “Little India” based on the origins and cultural presence of its newer arrivals.
Cosmopolitanism has not been a frequent attribute ascribed to American suburbanization. Fremont represents the rise of a newer, more diverse, globe-trotting suburbanite. By 2009, residents hailed from 147 countries and spoke more than 150 different languages. Admittedly, this diversity remains somewhat bounded as Latinos and African Americans make up much smaller percentages of the suburb’s population, 15 and 4 percent, respectively (Lung-Amam, 49).
Of course, in California, such demographics are not entirely, new nor confined to the South Bay. The San Gabriel Valley’s mix of Latino and Asian suburbs, such as Monterrey Park, Alhambra, and San Gabriel as documented by Wendy Cheng, have resulted in communities that reflect similar dynamics. 12 Gardena, just outside of Los Angeles, emerged arguably as the nation’s first Asian American suburb and one that like its South Bay counterpart openly leaned on its Pacific Rim connections. 13 However, as Lung-Amam notes, they are not completely analogous as Los Angeles County lacks the kind of tech industry aggregation of its northern counterpart, though like Cheng she emphasizes that Asian Americans are distinct from their white counterparts politically.
Perhaps the role of education captures the frayed dynamic of discrimination’s effects most accurately. Historians such as Kevin Kruse, Ansley Erickson, and Matthew Lassiter, among many others, have examined the historical motivations, factors, and consequences of school segregation particularly for African Americans. 14 Whites in Orange County, California, as explored by historian Lisa McGirr, fearing creeping liberalism and in search of community, utilized the school system as a galvanizing issue. 15
In Silicon Valley, schools from the elementary to the graduate level have cast an influence on the region’s politics and demographic and physical form. As O’Mara illustrates, Stanford’s role proved critical in constructing the symbolic and literal space of the Valley. The university, like many other institutions of higher learning, sought to cordon off black residents; hence, in 1958, the local school district built a new high school in the heart of East Palo Alto, a community that had rapidly flipped from white to black in the middle of the decade, largely to ensure the persistence of school segregation. 16
If conservative whites in Southern California rallied around education to promote a burgeoning conservatism, so too did Latinos in San Jose envision high school and collegiate institutions as a site of protest. During the 1960s, Latino students organized walkouts to protest the failure of school to meet educational needs. Though, at times, the two movements were in conflict or at cross-purposes, Black and Brown Power advocates rallied at San Jose State to raise awareness and advocate for curriculum changes and greater inclusion. If the CSO had focused more on labor issues during the 1930s and 1940s, the Chicano movement that came of age in the late 1960s viewed education as the critical element to level discrimination. “Many now placed a new emphasis on changing educational institutions rather than labor unions, the dominant concern of many earlier activists in the region,” notes Pitti (p. 180).
For Asian Americans, even those residing in upper middle class Fremont and Mission San Jose, school debates have uncovered an uncomfortable truth: “Asian American educational practices and ideas continued to be marginalized as out of place and foreign,” writes Lung-Amam (pp. 55-56). White residents expressed discomfort at increasing academic competitiveness, the decline of traditional sports such as football, and, in some cases, at the cosmopolitanism on display.
The end result has been “white flight” in which white and Asian American families emerged at odds regarding not only internal school policies but also the creation of new school districts. Ultimately, a fundamental conflict was revealed: white families believe that their view of schooling should be the norm and that their Asian American counterparts have corrupted the larger system. Adding further complexity, black and Latino students, who make up much smaller numbers of students attending schools in Mission San Jose and Fremont, perceive themselves as on the outside looking in as Asian American and white families battle (Lung-Amam, 74-75).
Taken as a whole, the three works represent a road map of the future as an exploration of the past. Pitti contextualizes work by Dave Gutiérrez whose Walls and Mirrors remains a foundational work documenting the political history of Mexican Americans, by exploring similar themes at the municipal level. The growing saliency of the nation’s Mexican American population only adds to the book’s import. One does wonder about neighborhoods beyond the Eastside. Jesus Hernandez has documented changes in Sacramento’s urban and suburban communities particularly in regard to Mexican Americans. 17 Some exploration of this in Silicon Valley would bolster Pitti’s study.
Similarly, Lung-Amam relies upon the more theoretical work of the 1990s such as Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Politics and places them in a suburban context. The results are fascinating and point to a future in which a majority minority United States will need to deal with a growing complexity around racial issues as the usual white–black binary fades into obsolescence. Asian American demographics and political influence, like that of its Latino American peers, will only grow in coming decades. Yet, Lung-Amam’s chapter on housing disputes fails to persuade readers as much as those on retail development, schools, and suburbanization more generally. Admittedly, to her credit, one wonders how much the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype undermines Asian American homeownership in that a key component of housing debates hinges on claims to tenure and permanence as a homeowner and member of the community. Yet, while race undoubtedly plays a role in debates about housing form and property rights in the Valley, numerous other ancillary forces do as well so her conclusions in this regard lack some clarity.
Finally, the “Amazonification” of commerce, its ubiquitous presence in American life, and the clear influence Silicon Valley has exerted on its internal culture and physical expression in Seattle serves as constant reminder that O’Mara’s work remains relevant and instructive. In the New York Times in 2018, she juxtaposed Amazon’s rise with that of Silicon Valley’s and cautioned Long Island City, NY, and Arlington, VA, residents to beware of exactly what might come next when the company opens its bifurcated H2Q: cloistered tech workers, rapidly rising rents and housing prices, and political and social resentment from long-tenured residents. Again though, with rise of social media since the publication of Cities of Knowledge, questions about Silicon Valley’s creeping influence on San Francisco and even Seattle would bolster her conclusions and raise new insights on the benefits of public–private partnerships at the heart of her work.
Too often, critics chide historians for being too backward looking and failing to engage the public. Yet, by looking to the past to explain the present of one of the most influential forces and regions in American life, O’Mara, Pitti, and Lung-Amam provide explanations for Silicon Valley’s history and present while also giving readers a sketch of its and the nation’s possible future. Much as The Social Network, despite historical liberties taken by Fincher, nonetheless highlighted issues about Zuckerberg and Facebook that should have served as warning shots regarding the dangers of burgeoning social media so too historians here draw our attention to how a service-and-tech-based economy translates on the ground and the opportunities, inequalities, and complexities that follow.