Malls of Meaning: Building Asian America in Silicon Valley Suburbia

Abstract

CALIFORNIA’S SILICON VALLEY OFTEN CALLS to mind a landscape of white-collar office parks and manicured research campuses filled with young dot-com boomers and self-made millionaires. Much of the writings on this vast suburban region likewise have tended to concentrate on the area as a breeding ground for invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship—home to America’s creative class and the pioneers of the digital revolution. This narrative, however, fails to acknowledge the diversity of people and places behind the region’s storied image. In a place often measured by the number of start-ups and venture capitalists, the lives of other residents and communities, especially those on the margins, frequently have gone unnoticed. Addressing this gap, several scholars have offered alternative accounts that spotlight the contributions of and the conditions suffered by women, minorities, immigrants, the poor, and others who have long existed in the Valley’s shadows. While not a prominent part of the writings about the region, such stories are not difficult to locate on the ground, as the expansion in information technology has gone hand in glove with vast demographic changes. Over the past half-century, as Silicon Valley’s population has swelled to accommodate a booming innovation economy, it also has shifted from majority-white to majority-minority. Asian immigrants have been among the region’s largest and fastest-growing groups (see table 1). Asian immigrants began arriving in Silicon Valley in record numbers after the passage of the historic 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, otherwise known as Hart-Celler. The act opened the floodgates to Asian immigration by lifting restrictive quotas from non-European countries and instituting new policies aimed at family reunification and at attracting skilled labor. Chinese from Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as Filipinos were particularly prominent among initial migrants. In the Valley, they later were 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. By then, the Valley was also welcoming large numbers of skilled immigrants from mainland China and India (see table 2). The region’s mild climate, extant Asian American community, and perhaps