Trespassers?. Willow Lung-Amam
portrait of suburbia and exclude the contributions of non-White and non-middle-class groups, a host of cultural and historic studies attest to the diversity that has always comprised suburbia.5 In the past several decades, scholarship on the suburban poor, new immigrants, and racial minorities, among others, has shown that social diversity has become more the suburban rule than the exception.6
How has the suburban landscape been reshaped by its changing demographic profile? How have these “other” suburbanites made home and built community among suburbia’s parks, playgrounds, schools, shopping malls, office parks, and other everyday spaces? How have they remolded the landscape in ways that challenge stereotypes about suburbia’s built environment and its residents? If mosques, Buddha lawn figurines, and Chinese fan dancers still appear out of place in suburbia, it is in part because scholarship has yet to sufficiently show how diverse suburban inhabitants have reshaped the look and feel of their chosen communities.
Trespassers? focuses on the processes of place making among Asian Americans, a group who have long existed on the suburban sidelines but are now at the center of its changing character. Asian Americans are the fastest growing of all racial minority groups in U.S. suburbs today. With 62% of all Asian Americans now residing in the suburbs of America’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, they are nearly as suburban as White Americans.7 This book examines the material products of Asian Americans’ attempts to build suburban communities to fit their complex identities and aspirations and the politics of their place-making practices. It asks how Asian Americans made their home in Silicon Valley by reshaping and repurposing their given landscapes. What social and political conflicts have been fought over the physical changes that Asian American inspired? And how have these challenges affected the ways in which Asian Americans have been integrated into their communities and the benefits that suburbia once seemed to promise its residents?
Silicon Valley is a dynamic region that for nearly half a century has been at the cutting edge of technology as well as suburban change. In 2012, 18 of the 20 U.S. cities with the highest proportion of Asian American residents were suburbs. Among these, 7 were located in Silicon Valley—more than in any other region.8 Since the 1970s, Asian Americans have tended to concentrate in what geographer Wei Li popularly termed “ethnoburbs”—multiethnic, largely immigrant suburbs such as Monterey Park in southern California’s San Gabriel Valley.9 Many early ethnoburbs emerged near traditional immigrant gateway cities such as New York and Los Angeles.10 Increasingly, however, they can be found in places that have never before served as popular immigrant destinations: Research Triangle Park in North Carolina; Silicon Desert in Arizona; North Austin, Texas; Route 128 outside Boston; the Dulles and I-270 corridors outside Washington, D.C.; Route 1 in Middlesex County, New Jersey; and Silicon Valley.11
The common factor linking these regions is their thriving innovation economies. High-tech regions are diverse and fast-growing destinations for creative-class migrants and new immigrants, especially Asian Americans.12 As Wei Li and Edward Park point out, these “techno-ethnoburbs” are distinct from other centers of suburban immigration, including “LA-type ethnoburbs” such as Monterey Park, in terms of the populations they attract, their geographies, and their economic base.13 Through a deep investigation of Fremont, a suburb that is one of the most popular destinations for Asian Americans in Silicon Valley, this book highlights how high tech is shaping the dynamics of Asian American migration and community formation as well as the region’s landscape and often heated politics of social and spatial change.
Most scholarship on Asian Americans in Silicon Valley and other high-tech areas is concerned with their role in fueling the economy as scientists, engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs or as low-wage, low-skilled laborers.14 Trespassers?, however, shows Asian Americans as community builders and place makers. It examines the ways in which Asian Americans in Fremont refashioned their surroundings to meet their desired lifestyles, paying particular attention to places through which they have marked and crafted their suburban sense of place.
Shut out of mainstream suburban social and economic life, Asian American migrants have long built “places of their own” in Silicon Valley suburbia.15 Particularly in the last few decades as Asian Americans and particularly Chinese and Indian immigrants have become a more significant presence in the region and wealthier than previous generations, they have transformed the spatial landscape of the valley in distinct ways. They moved into high-end neighborhoods to give their children the best education they could afford, shifting the social and academic culture of schools toward a more competitive environment with a more rigorous focus on math and science. In ethnic shopping centers, they established vibrant community spaces that service many suburbanites’ desires for Asian products and places that bridge the divide between their multiple geographies of home. And in several Silicon Valley neighborhoods, Asian Americans built homes that showcased their desires for modern spaces that fit their multigenerational households and aesthetic sensibilities.
These places mark a particular expression of the suburban American Dream for many Asian Americans in Silicon Valley. For generations of White Americans, white picket fences surrounding modest middle-class homes in racially homogeneous neighborhoods with good schools served as important markers of their success and prosperity. Among a generation of well-to-do, professional, and educated Asian Americans, however, their ability to move into racially diverse communities with high-performing schools, ethnic shopping centers, and large new homes are equally important markers of their achievements and desires.
Asian Americans’ efforts to weave their dreams within the valley’s existing spatial fabric have, however, been embattled. Over and over again, their efforts were met with skepticism, derision, and sometimes outright distain by established residents, city officials, planners, and others. Landscapes built by and for Asian Americans were portrayed as abnormal, undesirable, or simply “out of place.”16 The forms and uses of schools, shopping malls, and homes that Asian American newcomers inspired became markers of their seeming failure to integrate with and conform to their new environment. Further, these places, which I call landscapes of difference, became the focus of new city planning and design policies that tried to manage and mute their difference.
In the past, suburban inequality was marked and measured primarily by the exclusion of low-income residents, especially those of color, from suburbia’s borders. Today, however, inequalities exist among communities with far more diverse demographics and subtle expressions of social privilege and power. It is not only exclusionary attitudes that inhibit the ability of new suburbanites to carve out their own meaningful spaces. The dominant norms and standards that govern the landscape and limit expressions of difference in suburbia also reinforce White Americans’ privileged place within it. Together they comprise a normative framework in which certain spatial expressions are understood as acceptable, normal, or good, while others are not. Suburbia’s creed upholds spatial homogeneity, conformity, order, and stability as critical tenets of form. Though largely invisible, this framework has powerfully shaped suburban policy making and planning for decades, and its results are visible everywhere. Reinforced by local land-use policy, such ideas buttress the power of older suburbanites, principally the White middle class, to serve as the standard-bearers.
This book counters claims that boast of the postindustrial economy as color-blind and high-tech centers as postracial meritocracies. It also combats the proposition of Asian Americans as the so-called new Whites, whose high rates of homeownership, income levels, degree of educational attainment, and integration into White communities, particularly in the suburbs, suggest that they now enjoy the same privileges and benefits once reserved for White Americans.17 It is true that by all traditional measures, Asian Americans in Silicon Valley have, as a group, made it to the middle class. They are among the region’s most numerous and highly educated groups, have high incomes and high rates of homeownership, and are employed in large numbers in all ranks of high-tech employment. And yet, the landscapes they occupy, desire, and build are often read and regulated through the lens of racial and cultural difference. The constant challenges to their places of everyday life illustrate that not only class exclusion but also White cultural hegemony continue to push minorities to the suburban margins.
Importantly, Asian Americans in Silicon Valley have not been the passive