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Trespassers?. Willow Lung-Amam
Читать онлайн.Название Trespassers?
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520967229
Автор произведения Willow Lung-Amam
Жанр История
Издательство Ingram
Judiciary rulings and legislation, however, were slow to impact conditions on the ground. In the absence of racially restrictive covenants, common interest developments put in place homeowners’ associations and covenants, codes, and restrictions, requiring the maintenance of certain standards of home and neighborhood development and design. In high-end developments such as the many being built in Fremont during the period, such practices translated race-based forms of exclusion into more sophisticated class-based mechanisms.41 In some of Fremont’s earliest subdivisions such as Mission Ranch and Glenmoor Gardens, these tools helped maintain their exclusivity as largely upper-middle-class White neighborhoods well into the 1990s.
Suburban communities also banded together to enforce de facto segregation, forming neighborhood block groups and associations that provided vehicles for organized resistance. Real estate agents steered minorities away from certain neighborhoods, homeowners refused to sell their properties to non-Whites, and violence continued as an active threat to minorities seeking to move into many suburbs. In 1968 Tom Parks, who is African American, was looking to move out of his apartment in Oakland. He and his wife began by looking at over 100 apartments in Hayward and were consistently told that they were unavailable or required extraordinary security deposits. They were also steered away from purchasing a house in Fremont, where only 398 African Americans lived in 1970. When they bought in Newark instead, Tom recalled paying about $4,000 more than his neighbors and being harassed by five local police officers who launched a community-wide petition to prevent their purchase.42 “There is nothing much that has been done in the way of the force of law that has terribly altered the practices that are in place. They have just shifted in how they implement those practices,” Tom explained to me more than four decades later. As Arnold Hirsh argued, violence and intimidation, especially toward African Americans, might have actually increased as the legal restrictions waned.43 Certainly, the language of exclusion shifted during the period from a focus on race to property values. As historian David Freund has pointed out, doing so provided cover to White suburbanites to deny personal malice toward racial minorities and support exclusive practices in the name of “rational” market logic.44
Just as the rationales of suburban racial exclusion were changing, so too were perceptions about Asian Americans as suburban neighbors. In the 1930s and 1940s, the strategic alliance of the United States with China led many White Americans to consider the acceptance of Chinese Americans into their neighborhoods as part of their patriotic duty. In the face of rising demands for civil rights, stereotypes about Asian Americans as compliant and industrial laborers who were unlikely to challenge the social order added to their exceptionalism from the otherwise clear rules of postwar segregation, which affected African Americans most particularly.45 Tom recalled, for instance, that in 1949 when his family moved to San Mateo, a suburban community less than 20 miles south of San Francisco, his parents purchased their home through a “straw buyer,” a Chinese American friend who bought the home on the family’s behalf because the owners refused to sell to African Americans.
By the 1970s, changing attitudes regarding Asian American exceptionalism vis-à-vis other racial minorities had begun to ease their passage into new suburbs. This was most robust in inner suburbs such as Daly City, which abuts San Francisco’s southern border. There, the Asian American population went from only around 4,000 in 1970 to more than 22,000 by 1980—from less than 7% to nearly 29% of the city’s population. But even with such dramatic changes taking shape in some suburban communities, historian Charlotte Brooks notes that Asian Americans’ acceptance was conditional—oftentimes prefaced on the expectation that Asian Americans would quietly stay in their place and adopt the norms of their White middle-class neighbors.46
Further, many Asian Americans continued to meet resistance as they settled into new suburban communities. Indra Singh, an Indian American senior, recalled that when he and his wife moved to Fremont in 1972, children threw eggs at their home and toilet-papered their yard. A friend of his who was also Indian American had rocks thrown at their house and, as a result, moved out of Fremont.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, many more Asian Americans were beginning to make their way from other inner-ring suburbs such as Daly City or neighborhoods in San Francisco such as the Richmond District, where they had gained a foothold in the postwar period. The main factors pulling Asian Americans to the South Bay were the increasing availability of jobs and access to quality, affordable homes. Joe and Judy Wu are both American-born Chinese mathematicians who in 1973 were living and working in Oakland. In 1974 Judy got a job in South San Jose, and the couple made their way down the Nimitz Freeway, completed less than two decades earlier to connect Oakland to San Jose. Midway along their route, they discovered Fremont. There they found that they were able to purchase a two-bedroom home and pay less on their mortgage than they were spending to rent in Oakland. Joe could keep his job, commuting by car or Bay Area Rapid Transit, which opened a new station in Fremont in 1972, connecting the city to San Francisco and Oakland.
Andrew Li, an immigrant from Taiwan, was selling real estate and developing new homes in the 1980s in the Northgate neighborhood, where Judy and Joe settled two years after moving to Fremont. Andrew reported that while the low cost of new homes and job accessibility were the main draws for Asian Americans moving to the city during the period, one could not discount the important role that pioneers such as the Wus also played:
Chinese, Filipinos—they may have a townhome or house in Daly City. They got invited by their friends and they bought a home in Fremont. They would invite them over for Saturday afternoon barbecues. It would be 80 degrees. They enjoyed it tremendously. They would go back to Daly City where it would be 45 degrees on Saturday night. … Sunday morning, they would drive to Fremont again, looking for a house. … The house prices were comparable, and the weather was much better.
As Andrew noted, social networks drew many Asian Americans southward and to particular Silicon Valley communities. The easiest places to settle were often those with or in close proximity to extant minority populations. In Fremont, the long history of Chinese American, Japanese American, and Filipino American farmworkers increased its popularity among Asian American newcomers. Many came by word of mouth, following family members and friends to neighborhoods such as Northgate. David Li, whose Chinese American roots in the Bay Area date back to the 1850s, recalled that one of the things that convinced his parents to move from Berkeley to Fremont in the mid-1960s was that his mother’s cousin had recently relocated there.
Social relations were not the only factor that drove David’s parents to Fremont. Like many other Asian Americans, they were attracted to the range of possibilities that suburbia seemed to promise its residents. They wanted better schools and larger homes in safe, less crowded neighborhoods and also wanted to escape the same “urban ills” as their White neighbors. This no doubt included the growing concentration of poor communities of color. David stressed his parents’ desire for a quiet, semirural lifestyle. Shortly after he was born, his working-class parents purchased a four-bedroom home in Irvington that supported their growing family and a different sort of lifestyle than they had enjoyed in Berkeley. David explained:
I think it was just different. Fremont was just starting out. It was already a city, but it was a spread out community. “Spread out” meaning in between the neighborhoods that had sprung up at the time, we had farms and cow pastures. It was a different kind of living. It was country living. We just wanted to get away from the inner city, so to speak, and get back to the country. … I think [my parents] wanted a fresh start. … They decided there may be a better future for us there. It was a growing community with a lot of possibility.
In Fremont, David moved into a new home on a new street, with a new high school nearby. In all its novelty, suburbia invoked an endless sense of possibility, especially for those who had long been denied its benefits.
Though many Asian Americans held high hopes for their new suburban lives, they all too often found themselves surrounded by a sea of circumspect White faces. In 1970 Fremont’s population was 97% White, including