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Trespassers?
Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia
By Willow S. Lung-Amam UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96722-9
CHAPTER 1
The New Gold Mountain
Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something comes into its own and flourishes. ... Dwelling is primarily saving, in the older sense of setting something free to become itself, what it essentially is.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
THE CHANS MOVED TO SILICON valley in the early 1980s when Dan, an engineer at Ford Aerospace in Detroit, received a job transfer to Palo Alto. Dan and his wife Elaine had both emigrated from Taiwan in the 1960s and did their graduate work in the United States. Like most professional couples, they wanted the best home in the best neighborhood they could afford for their budding family. For them this was Mission San Jose, a neighborhood in the Fremont foothills with a mix of stately and modest single-family homes interspersed among vast stretches of rural farmland.
In their early days, the Chans were the only Asian American family they knew in Mission San Jose. While they never intended to be suburban pioneers, they also did not consider moving to denser urban neighborhoods in San Jose or San Francisco. They liked Mission San Jose's semirural appeal, accessibility to Dan's work, relatively affordable new homes, and up-and-coming schools. There they purchased a spacious three year-old home for $200,000 — less than they would have paid for a row house in San Francisco or a smaller older home in Palo Alto. On a good day, Dan was able to get to his office in about 30 minutes. More important for them, Mission San Jose's schools, where their son would enroll in three years, were well regarded and getting better.
Soon after the Chans got settled, Mission San Jose and the larger region changed in ways that they had not anticipated. One by one their neighbors sold their homes to professional Chinese American and Indian American families. Residential development and home prices boomed. Dan and Elaine's success in their professions and the housing market allowed them to trade their first home for a much larger newer house in a more esteemed section of the neighborhood. By the late 2000s, their home value had increased nearly fivefold. And by the time their son graduated from Mission San Jose High School, it was a majority Asian American school in a majority Asian American neighborhood and was considered to be among the most competitive schools in the state.
These changes convinced Dan and Elaine that Silicon Valley was the place for educated middle-class Taiwanese American families like themselves. While back in the 1980s they questioned whether they had made the right move, 20 years later they could not imagine living anywhere else. "I don't know where we'd go," Dan told me. The Chans loved their home overlooking the San Francisco Bay — "great feng shui," Dan noted. Though over the years the neighborhood had lost some of its rural charm, it was still nothing like the crowded cities where they had grown up in Taiwan. Besides, Fremont's popularity among other Asian Americans was what allowed their most cherished amenities to flourish. Dan and Elaine now had a Chinese-language newspaper delivered to their front door, watched all the same television stations they had in Taiwan, ate out regularly in nearby Chinese restaurants, and shopped primarily at Asian supermarkets right down the street. Dan even retained his love of badminton, playing three times a week at the Fremont Community Center. The Chans had come to feel close to their culture and homeland in the valley. "We have all the conveniences we want and don't have to speak English," Dan explained, noting that Fremont's newfound amenities saved them from the regular trips they used to make to Oakland's Chinatown — a drive they had not made in over a decade.
The Chans' love for their Silicon Valley lifestyle was not rooted in nostalgia for their lives in Taiwan but rather in their belief that the region offered the best of both Asian and American cultures. Dan observed, with some pride, that Fremont was "not like Monterey Park," the suburb of Los Angeles that Timothy Fong dubbed "America's first suburban Chinatown." Dan complained that "People tried to make [Monterey Park] exactly like Taiwan." Instead, he appreciated the small-town feel of Fremont's neighborhoods and the highly educated population they drew from all over the world. The Chans enjoyed the high-quality lifestyle that their privileged class status afforded them and, equally so, the diversity of faces and places that had become the norm in their well-to-do community.
Dan was not alone. Over the last half of the 20 th century, Asian Americans emerged among Silicon Valley's largest and fastest-growing groups, largely consisting of well-educated, high-income, professional immigrants from Taiwan, China, and India. These newcomers were part of a population boom that changed many of the region's cauliflower fields, orange groves, and predominately White middle-class communities into Silicon Valley suburbs with Asian American majorities. Like the Chans, these newcomers not only settled on the land; they embedded themselves in it. They raised their families, built new businesses, got hired and fired, met lifelong friends, made their fortunes, and saw some of it decline during the dot-com bust and the Great Recession.
What drew the Chans and so many other middle-class Asian Americans to Silicon Valley and to suburbs such as Fremont in the latter half of the 20th century? And how did these suburban migrants establish a sense of place and community on unfamiliar turf? This chapter traces four decades of unprecedented growth, development, and demographic change in the valley, underscoring how these forces helped to shape Asian Americans' evolving suburban dreams.
Indeed, Asian Americans' pursuit of the suburban dream, replete with its material pleasures and personal freedoms, and their perception of Silicon Valley as a productive place in which to pursue it have been just as central to shaping the demographics of the region as larger structural forces. The valley's booming technology industry has often been described as a "New Gold Rush." For many Asian Americans, the region's plentiful economic opportunities loosened the epicenter of their vision of the abundant riches of California's "Gold Mountain" from its roots in San Francisco. This shift refashioned the traditional 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. 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. 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. 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-i85os. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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." 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.
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 by about 500,000 people during the conflict. Like many western Sunbelt regions, Santa Clara Valley was a popular site for postwar growth. Core Bay Area cities such as San Francisco, Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley, which before the war contained up to four-fifths of the region's population, lost their favored status to expanding suburbs. Leaving behind increasingly overcrowded, dilapidated inner-city housing, many young middle-class families moved into suburban homes and neighborhoods being built on the South Bay's former agricultural empire. In San Jose, the population increased more than sixfold in only three decades — from fewer than 70,000 in 1940 to nearly 450,000 in 1970 — as the city annexed surrounding farms to make room for new neighborhoods of single-family homes. While the Bay Area doubled in size between 1930 and 1960 to over 2.6 million residents, the percentage of residents living in core Bay Area cities shrunk to less than half.
Postwar suburbanization, however, did little to relieve Silicon Valley's entrenched patterns of racial segregation. If anything, it deepened them. While Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration loans drove an unprecedented suburban building boom that accommodated returning White veterans and provided new homeownership options for many White working- and middle-class families, such loans were systematically denied to neighborhoods of color, particularly those in the inner city with older housing stock such as San Francisco's Chinatown. For many White Americans, suburbanization represented a class shift up that, according to anthropologist Rachel Heiman, "sealed their whiteness" and their identity with the middle-class American Dream. In the postwar period, this dream came to include good schools, nice homes, quiet neighborhoods, and the absence of lower-class and non-White residents.
New transportation technologies and federally underwritten infrastructure investments encouraged South Bay suburbanization, while federal policy favoring slum clearance and the dispersion of "blighted" poor and minority communities razed inner-city housing in neighborhoods whose residents had few options in suburbia. In the 1940s San Francisco's Japantown was part of the urban renewal plans for the Western Addition, which became one of the largest slum-clearance projects in the nation. By the end of the 1960s, over 8,000 residents and 6,000 housing units in Japantown had been displaced. Replaced by large-scale commercial buildings and upscale residential condominiums, few residents or affordable housing units returned to the neighborhood.
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Excerpted from Trespassers? by Willow S. Lung-Amam. Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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