Trespassers?. Willow Lung-Amam
those most likely to be employed in the higher-end positions, entering into the ranks as scientists and engineers. Many arrived under professional visas known as the third and sixth preference, which prioritized admissions for those with “exceptional abilities” and in occupations with short labor supply in the United States. They came seeking better jobs and educational opportunities than they had in their home countries and oftentimes greater political stability and freedoms. Filipinos fled far more dire circumstances, including the deteriorating economic and political conditions in the Philippines under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (1965–1986). Still, those who emigrated tended to be among the professional class and entered semiskilled professions that supported the valley’s economy, such as nursing and medical technology.56 They were later joined by a rush of political refugees from Indochina, particularly Vietnam, who arrived in several successive waves after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and throughout the 1990s.57 Often lacking formal education, many Indochinese refugees took jobs in manufacturing or other service-sector occupations such as construction, landscaping, and dishwashing. While plentiful and requiring little English-language skills, these jobs were often temporary, offered few legal protections, and had hazardous working conditions and little opportunity for upward mobility.58
While many recent arrivals initially settled into various communities in and around San Jose, their geographies quickly became as divided as their occupations. Southeast Asian immigrants, including Vietnamese and Filipinos, tended to cluster in “South County,” an area of Santa Clara County that stretched all the way south to Gilroy and whose core was in San Jose. Despite San Jose’s attempt to attract high-tech companies, its inexpensive housing, land, infrastructure, labor, and taxes compared to other Silicon Valley cities was attractive to many computer component manufacturing firms and their blue-collar workers.59 These included not only many Southeast Asian Americans but also Latinos and, to a lesser extent, African Americans.60 By 1990, Vietnamese Americans and Filipino Americans made up nearly half of the 152,000 Asian Americans in the city of San Jose.61
With growing presences in high-tech professions, Chinese and Indian Americans, however, bucked these trends. Instead, their primary geographies tended toward the more exclusive “North County” suburbs. Like Fremont, these communities had built their prestige on restrictive zoning that historically prevented race and class intermixing. By the mid-1970s when Asian immigration had reached new heights, however, many of the North County suburbs closest to Stanford University had already closed their borders to residential growth. By adopting strict no- and slow-growth policies, these close-in communities effectively raised the cost of land and pushed new development farther out. By 1975, 84,000 people commuted daily to the core Silicon Valley suburbs of Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Santa Clara.62 While shunning residential expansion and density, many of these same communities welcomed new high-tech firms. Municipal bonds supported infrastructural investments needed for white-collar office parks, while tough environmental regulations ensured that manufacturing firms would not set up shop.63
Fremont was one of the few North County suburbs to welcome new residential development. In fact, the city courted it. Progrowth elected officials wanted Fremont to join the ranks of its prosperous neighbors and encouraged property owners to make residential and industrial land available to help it do so. “The welcome mat is out,” announced Mayor Gus Morrison in 1989. “If someone wants to build a quality project here, I mean a quality project, they’ll never have a reason to be disappointed with Fremont.”64 Stressing the need for “quality” development that matched their middle-class aspirations, the city fast-tracked business permits, rezoned much of its industrial land to industrial research, made significant infrastructure investments, and provided generous tax incentives to high-tech companies.65 In an effort to attract new Silicon Valley wealth, Fremont radically shifted its development policies—going from one of the state’s most highly recognized planned-growth communities to one of its most progrowth communities in only three decades.
The city’s efforts paid off. New Silicon Valley residents and companies saw clear advantages to locating in Fremont. It was strategically located directly across San Francisco Bay from Palo Alto and just north of San Jose. Further, its large quantity of undeveloped land allowed new homes and industrial land to be sold at about half the price as in core Silicon Valley towns.66 High-tech businesses boomed in Fremont from the 1980s to the late 1990s. In the early 1980s the city became home to Apple®, which produced its first Macintosh computer there.67 It also attracted other large high-tech firms such as NEXT and Everex computer manufacturing. By 1989 Fremont was the fastest-growing city in the region for new high-tech firms, with roughly 6,200 acres of its industrial land occupied, primarily by manufacturers of computer-related electronics.68 Officials projected Fremont as “Silicon Valley North”—a moniker that reflected both its changing character and their hopes for the city’s economic future.
Fremont’s residential population was also booming. Between 1970 and 1990 while the populations of many core Silicon Valley communities hardly budged, Fremont’s nearly doubled from just over 100,000 people to nearly 175,000. During one of Santa Clara County’s most significant periods of growth, Fremont outpaced the county’s population growth rate 3.6% to 2.0%. “We’re a sleeping giant,” declared Gus Morrison. “Fremont isn’t that blue-collar town of old. That label just doesn’t fit anymore.”69
With its ample stock of new and affordable homes, good schools, and an increasingly sophisticated array of community and cultural amenities, Fremont was especially popular among newly arrived Asian immigrants. As evidence of the city’s popularity among Indian Americans, Indra Agarwal, an Indian immigrant who moved to Fremont in 1972, recalled becoming the 16th subscriber to India West, an Indo-American newspaper that started in Fremont in the early 1970s and now circulates throughout California. By the 1980s, the city had developed a reputation in many Asian immigrant circles as a good place to live. Like prior generations, these groups arrived by word of mouth to stay with friends, family members, or university classmates from overseas and eventually settled in the city.70
These newcomers started businesses together, networked among each other, moved into common neighborhoods, and began to build their own versions of the American Dream. When I asked Ishan Shah, a second-generation Indian American, why his family had relocated from Chicago to Fremont in the early 1990s, he spoke of both the importance of immigrant networks and what Fremont meant to families such as his. “We had heard that’s where all the immigrants went,” he explained. “It was a community of people driven by the same principles. [My parents] really connected with that. They felt that this was going to be a good place with people like us.” While Ishan’s father was trained as a computer engineer, he moved to Fremont to pursue his lifelong dream of starting his own business. In 2009, Ishan announced his bid for Fremont City Council. At the age of 17, he became the youngest declared candidate to ever run for public office in the United States. According to Ishan, it could only have happened in Fremont. For both he and his father, the city represented a land of opportunity and was key to their American Dream.71
S. Mitra Kalita argues that for many post-1965 Indian immigrants, the American Dream and the suburban dream have been deeply intertwined. “For many, homeownership in a place with a good school district and soccer leagues, strip malls and picket fences, signified the completion of the American Dream,” she wrote.72 According to Kalita, what most post-1965 Indian immigrants wanted from suburbia was similar to that of most other Americans.73 But there were also important differences. The first waves of post-1965 Asian immigrants were looking for suburbs with, as Ishan said, “people like us.” It was a generation who in large part had come to the United States for higher education. They were high-achieving, upwardly mobile, and more culturally “assimilated” than previous generations. They had saved up and sacrificed to purchase new homes in quiet suburban neighborhoods with good schools that were easily accessible to their jobs. But they also sought out places in proximity to their cultural touchstones: Asian grocery stores, restaurants, community institutions, places of worship, and other professional Asian Americans.
These amenities and their shared value among others of similar racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds gave Asian American suburbanites a sense of home, place, and security. These