History
The longer history of the Santa Clara Valley is complicated and is an intersection between narratives of Latinos and Whites. This contested history has it roots in conquest of what we now call California. The genocide of the indigenous Ohlone peoples, the first civilization in the San Francisco Bay Area, was wrought by early Spanish explorers and settlers whose diseases, weapons and enslavement caused death and starvation.26 Spaniard like José Joaquin Moraga, went on to found cites in what was to them a new frontier. The first of these city was El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe founded in 1777, now called San José. Mexico won dependence from Spain in 1821 and the area around Santa Clara contained numerous ranches, whose names are still memorialized in the streets, neighborhoods and cities of Santa Clara. Starting around1849, large numbers of Anglo-Americans began migrating into California, changing the racial make up and causing racial problems for the Mexican population.27 By the time California obtained statehood in 1850, Santa Clara County was one of the whitest counties in California. This process of racial discrimination was purposefully designed thorough laws and court rulings.28
This prejudicial atmosphere remained the case up until the late 1950’s.29
Santa Clara Valley was dramatically reshaped during the 1910’s and 1920’s and the emerging agricultural economy of fruit orchards created a need for seasonal workers. Santa Clara County quickly became one of the many stops on the seasonal circuit of Mexican labor. Most workers were made to feel unwelcome, permanent residency remained difficult throughout the valley, and the majority of Mexicans were confined to what was considered the backwater of the county, an area abandoned after World War I by white farmers due to the poor soil and water access.30 These inhospitable lands, now defined as “East San José” became the first recorded barrio in the region in 1920, which up until then had not existed in Santa Clara. A Mexican American Migrant worker named César Chávez, one of the co-founders of the United Farm Workers, who in 1939 remembered that his family had “stopped on Jackson Street by an isolated but crowded
barrio where many farm workers lived.” Chávez goes on to explain: “Again we had no place to stay. The Barrio wasn’t large, just two unpaved dead-end streets running into Jackson and bordered on thee sides by fields, and pastures”31. The area César speaks about was know as East San José, a small section of San José located on the East banks of the Guadalupe River and west of today's highway 101.This description stands in contrast to the white orchard growers’ marketing of the valley at that time as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight”. The Valley’s historical white population and its recent European immigrants kept the migrant Mexican population's in labor intensive industries, while they were forced to endure temporary living arrangements due to the hostile racial climate. Politicians, farmers and business owners shared beliefs of Mexicans were commonly printed in the news papers on how Mexicans lived in squalid quarters; such beliefs included the possibility Mexicans workers could cause lower wages for American workman. Politician, Land developers and white homeowners deterred the development of Mexican permanency by drafting real estate deeds that included explicit restrictions to selling or renting property to non-whites, Chinese, or Japanese and Mexicans.32 Restrictive covenants, beginning around 1920, grew in popularity as whites moved into the newly developed middle class neighbors in the burgeoning cities west of San José, such as Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Mountain View, until they were declared illegal in 1948.33 Newly incorporated cities like Los Altos, formed in 1952, specially as a reaction against what they saw as undesirable growth, and as away to control their own zoning laws.34 This practice was and is common in California as legal way to keep development of apartments and other types of low income housing out of cities.35
The East Side is the name for several neighborhoods east of highway 101 annexed by the City of San José in 1911. These neighborhoods each would bear the environmental effects of the valley’s fruit companies such as the Mayfair Packing Company in the 1950s, whose stench and ineffective sump pumps attracted rats. The economic conditions reflected the white farmers’ systemic discrimination, allowing the same owners to take advantage of low-income migrants who toiled under terrible conditions and lived in barrios with names like “Piojo” (Lice), “Posole” (stew) and Sal si puedes (Leave if you can).36
Over the next thirty years large numbers of Mexicans, Central Americans and Mexican Americans continued to migrate into these neighborhoods. They also began to reshape other parts of Santa Clara Count by slowly moving into newly opened neighborhoods of San José, Mountain View, and Santa Clara and other cities of the valley, directly as a result of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The County went from a nearly 97 percent white population in 1960 to one with a 12.1% percent Latino population by 1970. The growth was a direct result of the 1965 Immigration Act, which ended the free movement Mexicans had across the US. Border. As this new undocumented class of Mexican and Central Americans developed, they became more permanent due to the risk of getting caught. Today’s Mexican, Central American and Mexican-American population is 507,754 or 26.1% of the population in the county, the majority still occupying and living in the neighborhoods found on the East Side of San José due to low economic opportunities and high cost of housing and immigration status.37 Today Los Altos, meanwhile, is still figuratively a walled city of whites, with only 3.9 percent of the population Latino.38
The brimming electronic and computer economy of 1960’s brought prosperity to Santa Clara but created a more uncertain economy for Latinos following the decline of the local fruit-processing industry. By the late 70’s, most canneries had closed due to the valley transitioning from an agricultural industry into a post-industrial suburbanized economy.
This dramatic economic dislocation produced higher unemployment for Latinos as local institutions, corporate hiring practices, and unequal educational opportunities continued to prevent Latinos from accessing the new economy. By the late 1980’s Mexicans were laboring in the new microelectronics industry in low paying, operative jobs; Mexicans also typically served in this new economy as janitors, landscapers, construction, food and other service-related industries stemming from demands by the wildly successful white middle and upper classes of the valley. Today, in a dramatic turn of events, local labor organizations have sought to organize immigrant service workers at corporations such as Apple, Google, Facebook, and Intel in order to create an inclusive, socially responsible labor movement for all workers.39
The push for political representation and social justice for Mexicans and others living on the East Side of San José occurred through the direct grassroots actions, community involvement, and local organizations. It is important to understand the role early organizations, like Community Service Organization (CSO) played in organizing and developing leaders within the Mexican community. Up until the early 1950’s the Mexican Community had been the target of racial discrimination, hangings, and police harassment. CSO community members actively passed out flyers and organized men and women in bars, living rooms, kitchens and canneries, educating them about voting rights, police brutality and workplace discrimination.40 The CSO has been particularly notable as the training ground for César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Fred Ross, and Gilbert Padilla.
Father McDonnell’s friendship with César Chávez, an unemployed lumberyard worker in the neighborhood of Sal si puedes, led to César’s introduction to CSO. The work César did while a member of CSO laid a foundation and understanding to the plight of the migrant farm worker. He later founded The United Farm Workers and led direct actions against the abuses of farm growers through boycotts, strikes and marches. The most famous march of United Farm Workers was the 300-mile march, or perigrinacion, from Delano to Sacramento in 1966, against the Delano grape growers and their unfair labor practices. 41Locally, a strong Chicano movement developed, lead by students who organized the community and called for changes in education as well as an end to police harassment. Students across the East Side of San José from Roosevelt Junior High School, W. C. Overfelt High School, James Lick High School and San José State University began walkouts, marches and protests demanding changes from City Hall.42 On April 9, 1974 over 200 Mexicans and Chicanos marched from San José State University to Sacramento, reminiscent of the United Farm Workers march of 1966. This pilgrimage as it was called, this counter space organized by students, demanded equal treatment and funds for all Mexican children in education.43 Graduations among Mexican-American immigrants continue to improve today and a number of middle class families exist in the area and are steadily increasing. In response to the Chicano movement’s protests and political calls for a just educational system in the 70’s, governmental programs specifically created for and by Latinos opened new educational opportunities at the local colleges and universities, one example is San José State’s Mexican American Studies.44 The benefit of this newly educated class has been success in elevating some Mexican-Americans into the ranks of professional corporate management structure of the Valley. It would not be until 1998 that San José elected Ron Gonzales, as its first and only Mexican American mayor. Currently, the East Side of San José is represented on the City Council of San José by Magdalena Carrasco, as well as by State Assembly member Nora Campos. This modest representation still calls for greater political action within the Mexican and Latino community. Silicon Valley loves a good immigrant’s tale. Too bad the rates of Latino hiring in the tech industry are still very low; Google, for example it is 2% black, 3% Latino, 30% Asian,30% women, and 60% white but in leadership roles whites total up to 72%.45 The other major tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Apple, and Yahoo are very similar.46
Latino writers’, artists’, dancers’ and arts organizations’ role in nurturing and providing a counter narrative and space for the telling and expression of Mexican culture and spirit throughout the East Side is significant if not complete. Activist playwright, Luis Valdez, graduate of James Lick High School, and his theater group El Teatro Campesino, (Farmwokers Theatre) redefined the Mexican experience through performance and plays; his most famous play Zoot Suits was turned into Hollywood film in 1981.47 Frank Torres’s mural Mural de La Raza painted in 1985, turns a non-space, the empty side of a building on Story Road near Jackson Ave, into a counter space that is no longer a wall but a “corazón” of Chicano celebration, featuring a portrait of Luis Valdez, members of El Teatro Campesino, along proud images of Zoot Suit Culture. Calpulli Tonalequeh, a local Mexica/Aztec dance group, through celebratory public dances, serves as a cultural healer and reminder to the Mexican community of its own historicalness.
The Mexican Heritage Plaza, built in 1999 and located in the Mayfair district, on the former lot of the Safeway grocery store which was the focus of the fist boycotts of grapes grown in Delano, California, now serves as the central space for the communities on the East Side to gather, engage and celebrate in the diverse arts and cultures of Mexicans, Mexican-Americans and Latinos.48 Current visual artist Roberto Romo, Dancer Arturo Magaña, and poet Robert Farid Karimi’s works are complex and, unlike the stereotypical “vato” artist depicted in the HBO series “Silicon Valley,” are fused with emotions, and passions.
However, The East Side story of Latinos in Silicon Valley feels very incomplete, just a story of numbers and statistics; missing are the lives of the people. At the heart of this story are people and their everyday struggles. Their story has only begun, but is nowhere near complete. Change has come to the East Side as McMansions have arisen on the streets of Mayfair, Mt. Pleasant, and Alum Rock neighborhoods. Franchises like Chipotle, Starbucks, and new chain businesses like Mi Pueblo are sprouting up on every commercial strip in order to serve the growing immigrant economic market. New stories abound from old and new residents, of both success and struggle. The history of the changing East Side community, with its nuance and complexity needs an inclusive public history narrative that includes the current political, racial and economic change.
I end with Lorna Dee Cervantes’ poem “Freeway 280”. The poem speaks of the contested space and complicated histories and experiences of Chicanos.
Las casitas near the gray cannery,
nestled amid wild abrazos of climbing roses
and man-high red geraniums
are gone now. The freeway conceals it
all beneath a raised scar.But under the fake windsounds of the open lanes,
in the abandoned lots below, new grasses sprout,
wild mustard remembers, old gardens
come back stronger than they were,
trees have been left standing in their yards.
Albaricoqueros, cerezos, nogales . . .
Viejitas come here with paper bags to gather greens.
Espinaca, verdolagas, yerbabuena . . .I scramble over the wire fence
that would have kept me out.Once, I wanted out, wanted the rigid lanes
to take me to a place without sun,
without the smell of tomatoes burning
on swing shift in the greasy summer air.Maybe it’s here
en los campos extraños de esta ciudad
where I’ll find it, that part of me
mown under
like a corpse
or a loose seed.
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