Trespassers?. Willow Lung-Amam
and ethnic divides among Asian Americans. Among Chinese Americans, while earlier generations of immigrants tended to concentrate in relatively poor urban enclaves, speak Cantonese, and hail from Hong Kong or China’s Guangdong Province, latter generations tended to live in middle-class Silicon Valley suburbs, speak Mandarin and fluent English, and come from major urban centers in Taiwan and mainland China. These two groups coexist but with very little social or professional interaction.108 Whereas Asian Americans’ social isolation in suburbia once led them to find common cause with their urban counterparts, the geographic and social distance between generations increased the chasm to a gulf. While San Francisco and Oakland Chinatowns struggled to survive amid a long process of bleeding businesses and residents to the suburbs, Silicon Valley suburbs thrived as destinations for young professionals who had a far different sense of what it was to be Asian American.
The emergence of middle-class Silicon Valley suburbs such as Fremont also increasingly separated Asian Americans from African Americans and Latinos, who had not suburbanized at the same rates. When they did, these groups tended to live in more working-class suburbs farther from the Silicon Valley core. By 2010, African Americans comprised 3% and Latinos about 15% of Fremont’s population. Asian Americans were learning to build community in more diverse neighborhoods than many had left behind in Bay Area urban centers and the countries from which they hailed, and certainly more so than the waves of White Americans who had moved to the suburbs before them. But their suburban communities were also more diverse ethnically than racially and more so racially than economically. The diversity that had come to characterize Silicon Valley softened the racial and class lines that had once defined cities and suburbs but, at the same time, also signaled the creation of more complex spatial and social geographies within suburbia.
• • •
The path to the New Gold Mountain, like the old, has been littered with stumbling blocks and stop signs. Prior to 1965, Asian Americans’ struggles in Silicon Valley were defined primarily by their efforts to find permanence and avoid the threat of displacement. They toiled on the land, seeking through their labor to legitimate their claims to it. But they were constantly threatened by their tenuous legal status as citizens and property owners. For civil rights–era Asian Americans, hard-won battles settled many legal questions, but their status as suburbanites was still widely questioned. They lived in constant tension with neighbors who openly fought for communities that did not include them. Excluded from one suburban dream, Asian Americans began to carve out another.
It was not until the birth of high-tech industry in Santa Clara Valley that Asian Americans’ claims to the region finally seemed settled. Among this generation, their challenge was to build homes and communities in suburbs that had not yet established a comfortable place for people like them. They did so at a time of great dynamism, when waves of immigrants with little resemblance to those who had come in previous decades were flooding into the region. More likely upwardly mobile, educated, and professional, these migrants brought their own American Dream with them. Together they started restaurants, travel companies, banks, real estate firms, language schools, ethnic newspapers, and cultural and religious institutions. This generation was no longer fighting for suburbia; they were building it anew.
Today, Asian Americans are moving into Silicon Valley suburbs in which they are in the majority and where the landscape is beginning to affirm their desired lifestyles. Chinese and Indian Americans now dominate the engineering and research sector of high-tech firms, and many have broken through the infamous “bamboo ceiling” to enter positions in management and launch their own firms.109 Shopping malls, restaurants, and stores catering to the needs and desires of Asian Americans abound. Asian American students are in the majority at many of the region’s top-performing schools. They now live in some of the valley’s most exclusive neighborhoods and, in general, feel far less pressure than previous generations to shed their ethnic identities and customs during their move to the suburbs.110
Asian Americans’ inclusion in suburban life, however, has never been on equal terms to that of White Americans, nor has it been complete.111 As the remaining chapters make clear, despite their many advantages, Asian Americans are still fighting to make the valley their home and for broader recognition of their rights as suburbanites. Just as Japanese American tenant farmers once hoped to put down roots and leave their mark on the land upon which they worked and raised their families, so too are today’s Silicon Valley migrants. Their challenge is to build communities that reflect their identities, broad geographic ties, mobile lifestyles, extended social and familial networks, and everyday social and cultural practices. They struggle with how to express their dreams in a suburban landscape precast for a different set of dreamers. Their battles are not fought on the streets or with neighbors openly hostile to their presence and instead are waged more quietly in city council meetings, with planning commissions, in development reviews hearings, in school board meetings, at parent-teacher conferences, and over the white picket fences of their well-manicured lawns.
Undoubtedly one of the arenas in which Asian Americans’ pursuit of their suburban dreams have been the most rigorously pursued and hotly contested has been local schools. In the next chapter, I explore how the premium that Chinese Americans and Indian Americans have often placed on enrolling their children in high-performing schools has reshaped Silicon Valley neighborhoods, Fremont city politics, and the lives of Asian American youths. The chapter shows how the changing racial and ethnic composition of some of the region’s most competitive schools has raised tough questions about what constitutes a quality education and equitable schools in Silicon Valley’s diverse suburbs.
TWO
A Quality Education for Whom?
Education has always been at the center of suburban politics.
MICHAEL JONES-CORREA
NESTLED AMONG FREMONT’S southern foothills is Mission San Jose, a neighborhood that has long been known for the 18th-century Spanish mission, which marks the main intersection of its historic downtown.1 More recently, the neighborhood has become internationally recognized for another landmark—Mission San Jose High School. Until the mid-1990s Mission High was a prototypical suburban American school, made up of a largely White middle-class student body. Today it is a premier destination for highly educated families from all over the world, especially Asia, and one of the highest-ranked schools in California (Figure 6).
FIGURE 6. Mission San Jose High School has become an internationally renowned public high school, especially popular among Asian American families. Photo by author.
Over the last few decades Asian Americans have transformed the face of many American public schools, especially those at the top. In 2010, California’s five highest-ranking public schools all had majority Asian American student bodies.2 The academic performance of Asian American students in schools across the United States has raised a host of scholarly debates about the factors that constrain and promote their educational achievement—the role of the model minority myth, culture, parenting, income, selective immigration, and other individual and structural factors.3 But there are other important questions to ask about the forces behind these trends and their impacts.
In this chapter, I examine how schools figured into the aspirations that many Asian American families brought with them to Silicon Valley and the ways in which their desires and decisions about education reshaped the region’s schools, neighborhoods, and development politics. By taking a close look at changes that have engulfed Mission San Jose High and its wider neighborhood over the past few decades, I argue that schools have been a major catalyst for the remapping of regional racial geographies and a critical battleground for Asian American suburban politics.
For many Asian American families, high-performing schools such as those in Mission San Jose were the dominant factor drawing them to relocate to Fremont from around Silicon Valley, the United States, and even abroad. Schools were key to many Asian Americans’ visions of success in the United States and their newly adopted suburban communities. Many viewed education as their primary means