Trespassers? - Willow Lung-Amam

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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.7 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.8 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.9 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.10

      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.11 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.12 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.13 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.14 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.”15 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.16

Lung

      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.17 Like many western Sunbelt regions, Santa Clara Valley was a popular site for postwar growth.18 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.19 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.20

      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.21

      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.22

      Discriminatory lending and real estate practices such as racial steering, blockbusting, and redlining as well as individual and collective acts of discrimination and violence often denied Asian Americans and other racial minorities access to suburban housing and a growing number of suburban jobs. Racially restrictive covenants, which were applied with increasing frequency in the immediate postwar period, were ruled unconstitutional

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