San Jose: Multicultural Metropolitan

This week we will be focusing on the local Bay Area communities. This post will focus on San Jose, California, the 10th largest city in the US with a 33% Latina/o population, the majority of which is ethnic Mexican.

Greater San Jose, 1951

film by San Jose Chamber of Commerce

 via YouTube.com

HISTORY

Image via www.vintage-maps-prints.com

San Jose, California was founded in 1777 during the Spanish Colonial period. The city is actually older than Los Angeles and served as the first State capital from 1850-1851.

Santa Clara county and San Jose in particular were coined “Valley of the Hearts Delight” based on the fact that much of the 19^th and early 20^th based on the thriving agricultural production. So while we know San Jose as an urban/suburban center, it was in reality an agricultural space for much of its early development.

Image via lettersfromtheempire.com

Current residents in their 60s and 70s will remember San Jose when much of the area held large fruit orchards. There were canneries, packing plants, and food machinery in spaces where there is now housing developments and urban life. Starting in the 1950s, in the post World War II era, San Jose began to grow in population and size significantly. In the late 1940s over 100,000 acres of land in the valley was devoted to farm production and 90% of California’s canned fruit and vegetables was produced here. During the 1950s and 1960s canneries offered the main source of employment for the ethnic Mexican working class community.

Fruit Cannery, San Jose, CA. Image via Historic Postcard Collection,1925-1930, SJPL.

In San Jose the agriculture industry declines as the population began to grow. Farmlands were sold and real estate began to take over as the pastoral dream shifted into a burgeoning suburbia. By 1990 only 16,300 acres of land in Santa Clara County was used for agricultural production and the cannery industry, which boasted upwards of 50,000 workers in 1950, had less than 4,000 employees by 1992.

The population increase was also rapid in the second half of the 20^th century. In 1940 Santa Clara County had 175,000 residents with 69,000 people in San Jose. In 1990 Santa Clara County had 1,463,530 residents with 803,000 in San Jose.  The most recent population information shows San Jose at 1,015,785 as of 2014.

TECHNOLOGY CAPITAL

Notably, San Jose is part of the globally recognized “Silicon Valley.” The Bay Area has become the epicenter for technology. 1,500 of 2,500 electronic firms in the US are located within 30 miles of downtown San Jose. This shift from agriculture to technology was a major influence on the population increase and growth of the city. It created more jobs and more housing but the technology wave that we are currently riding also created a major division between the haves and have nots in San Jose.

Cesar Chavez at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, East San Jose, circa 1960s

Image via koolturamarketing.com

In the late 20^th century as the city of San Jose was evolving, we began to see a physical division of the population where East San Jose (east of the downtown area) became a concentration for working class and new immigrant communities, the largest being ethnic Mexican/ Chicana/o. Downtown San Jose during the 1980s reflected this shift as it turned from a vibrant social, business, and political space into a decaying eyesore for the city.

Downtown San Jose, First Street, 1970s 

Image source unknown

Since the 1980s more than 1.4 billion dollars have been spent on redeveloping the downtown area. However, this push to revitalize this space has also resulted in pushing out small business owners, many of which at the time were Mexican owned. Ethnic Mexican businesses began to repopulate in East San Jose where there was a larger concentration of ethnic Mexican community. But what this demonstrates is the emergence of San Jose as a dual city. On one side (metaphorically and geographically on the Westside) you have the tech industry, which boasts high-skilled, highly educated workers representing the bulk of the income. On the other side (East San Jose and parts of South San Jose) you have a secondary labor force predominately working-class and specifically racialized Latinas/os (ethnic Mexican), Vietnamese, Filipinas/os, etc.

San Jose presents itself as wealthy with a median income of $80,977 (2013), which is significantly higher than the overall state average. And yet the wealth is not evenly distributed. Approximately 1/3 of the regions Latina/o households are near or below the poverty line. With the current state of the city’s housing costs soaring, along with much of the Bay Area, we can expect to see an exodus of working class communities, largely communities of color. People are having to make decisions about leaving their homes or staying in a place where the rent is skyrocketing to more than 50% of their income. This will definitely impact our overall conversation about what makes a community.