Silicon Valley’s Otro Lado
When one makes the journey to César Chávez’s house in San José, you soon learn the neighborhood is bound on two sides by a modern elevated freeway, sending traffic whirling by at 70 miles per hour traveling from the East Bay to destinations west and up to San Francisco. Once you exit the freeway, you find yourself traveling on what were once dusty roads, now paved, past the modest small single-story bungalows, each variegated fence calling attention to the individuality of the homeowners; and if you look, growing in some of the front lawns are nopales, cactus plants often eaten as a vegetable. To see César Chávez’s house in this older neighborhood you need to turn onto Scharff Avenue, which is off San Antonio Road. Then you must walk to 53 Scharff and on the right hand side, you will come to signage that can only be seen from the sidewalk; other than the signage there are no other indications of the importance of this space. This neighborhood, from all outward appearances, has changed little; a narrow street cinches tightly populated small California bungalows in a grip of urban congestion. Yet, this street is the one that Chávez lived on with his family from 1951 to 1953. This neighborhood is where Chávez joined the SCO and began his work as a community organizer. It is the neighborhood where Chávez met Father Donald McDonnell at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church and learned the power of nonviolent resistance. Today the neighborhood is still populated with Latino families, but now a new generation attends an elementary school named after César Chávez, and nurtures a community garden where nopales are grown and supports a community center in an area once known as Sal si puedes – “Get out if you can”– now simply called “Mayfair”.
If you get back onto the 280 freeway and head west for 5 miles, towards the heart Silicon Valley, you first pass Adobe’s corporate headquarters, a cathedral of steel and glass rising up among the gleaming buildings of downtown San José, then you pass miles of subdivisions of sameness, until in the middle of this sameness rises construction work on Apple’s new corporate headquarters, dubbed “spaceship”. As you continue west, tucked on the far side of the valley, only 17 miles for my students’ neighborhood, lies the small homogeneous bedroom community of Los Altos . Here on 2066 Crist Drive, in 1960 Steve Jobs moved with his parents to the midcentury modernist suburban track community of low slung ranch style homes designed by an Eric Eichler competitor. The neighborhood, with its wide streets and manicured lawns, was first inhabited by the newly employed engineers and other working-class families in the emerging tech industry. Here, surrounded by orchards and farm country, were the office parks for
Hewlett-Packard where Jobs would get a summer part-time job. Atari, another company for which Jobs would work, in addition to Fairchild Semiconductors, Intel and Stanford University are all located nearby. Jobs would go on to credit Eichler’s architecture with inspiring him to produce minimalist designs for the masses, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography, “Steve Jobs”. Now the homes are no longer affordable to the middle class, with prices over $1-2 million per lot, and today the orchards are gone leaving in their place new orchards made of steel and glass named Apple, Google and Facebook. Is the connection between Los Altos and the Sal si puedes neighborhood only the 17 miles of freeway?
Top Photo is of Steve Jobs’ Childhood House. Bottom Photo is of Cesar Chavez house in San José. Photos Credit: William Cavada, June 12, 2015.
Eric Fischer Map shows the distribution and segregation of racial community in the Bay Area. The East Side of Santa Clara Valley, clearly shows the concentration of the Latino community, while Los Altos remains predominantly white.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/5559901477/in/album-72157626354149574/
Eric Fischer’s “2010: San José Maps of Racial and Ethnic Divisions in US cities” "Race and Ethnicity 2010: San José.” Flickr. Yahoo!, n.d. Web. 25 July 2015.
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