History in Our Everyday Lives

Introduction

“Is it a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it, or a window through which one might better know the world?”¹

- John Elderfield, Former Chief Curator at Museum of Modern Art

The objective of the unit is to show students the power of moving images, and that these images produce powerful feelings and communicate ideas in ways that transcend the written word. Through visual media students can convey their perspectives, share their own experiences, and in the process, move us as human beings. Ultimately, the goal is to not only give students help establishing a voice that is seldom heard, but to connect their own stories and history into the broader social and political landscape of Silicon Valley.

Santa Clara County has emerged as one of the world’s most multicultural and ethnically diverse areas, as Mexican, Central American, South American, Asians, South Asian, Europeans and other nationalities have migrated for economic and political reasons. Ironically, however, this diversity is not represented in the region's technology workplaces. For instance, the offices and cubicles across Silicon Valley reflect the disparity and growing opportunity gap for Latinos and women in the new economy.²

A valley that built itself on innovation must join in the pressing need for a different form of social change in order to ensure a better future for all residents including students from the East Side. If not, another generation may lose out in being able to participate in this new economy.³ In this unit students create personal documentaries that answer the broader question of how they fit into the history of Silicon Valley. In the process, students demystify their understanding of Silicon Valley, and they reexamine and re-frame Silicon Valley in the context of the social memories and cultural productions that shape popular conceptions of the region.

In order to understand the role geography has played in shaping Silicon Valley, students need the tools to decode the visual symbolism of their landscape. Spatial theorist, Michel de Certeau writes how the practice of moving ourselves with the urban build infrastructure turns these created places into memory spaces, a process that repeats

itself everyday, turning our “places into spaces of meaning and history”.⁴ As students conduct contemporary analyses of the spaces surrounding the early homes of Steve Jobs and César Chávez, which are both historical landmarks, and examine how these physical spaces tie in with the broader social, economic, and environmental issues of today’s Silicon Valley, students gain an understanding of Silicon Valley’s unique complex of myths, symbols and contested histories.

Through film, students will be able to work on self-documentaries that "speak back" to the popular representations of Silicon Valley that circulate in the media in the form of internet postings, television shows such as HBO’s Silicon Valley, and the news. This project will be fertile ground for the students to research and juxtapose alongside their own rich experiences and personal histories. These self-documentaries will call on students to draw upon the rich history of the area, looking at social, economic, and environmental justice issues. Students will identify iconic spaces in San José that for them represent public sites where they see their communities butting up against or challenging the tech juggernaut. These spaces form a counter balance to representational space imposed onto my students by dominant social and cultural institutions. These “counter spaces” are significant because they are where individuals change “representational spaces into spaces of representation”.⁵ The ways these “counter spaces" disrupt life in Silicon Valley are important for the telling of their histories. And as part of the creative process, students will be able choose to include the social memory and spatial memory in more personal ways. Concurrently, students will be tasked with understanding the language of film and acquiring new academic language, which will give them new ways of thinking about the past and Silicon Valley. The culmination of this learning is that each student will create his or her own purposeful documentary film. Each film that will be created will pose different questions and provide different answers about Silicon Valley—past and present.⁶