The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy

3. The Valley of the Heart’s Delight: Santa Clara County’s Agricultural Period, 1870–1970

The Valley of the Heart’s Delight Santa Clara County’s Agricultural Period, 1870–1970 Introduction: Orchards and Canneries in the “Fruit Bowl of America” Wheat production in the Santa Clara Valley peaked in the early 1880s when mechanization and year-round harvesting led to poor soil conservation and overproduction. Wheat was rapidly becoming a crop of the past, and Santa Clara County’s fruit and vegetable processing industry had been competing for dominance since its start in the 1870s. Like the Spanish missionaries a century before, Italian, French, and German immigrants brought cuttings of vines and fruit trees to Santa Clara County from their home countries, and these seeds laid the foundation for the next stage of economic “development” in the area.1 The demand for fresh and packed fruit rose exponentially during and after the Gold Rush and the Civil War. The Gold Rush “ushered in wildly inflated prices for fruit” and was responsible for exponential population growth in the state, creating an opportunity for Santa Clara County to profit from its fertile soil.2 Santa Clara County became the state’s leading producer of fresh, dried, and canned fruit, and the nation’s leading producer of prunes, which could easily be shipped by rail to markets on the East Coast. As late as the 1950s and early 1960s, some observers claimed that the county was the single largest producer of canned produce in the world.3 Immigrants, People of Color, and Women Workers in the Valley The need for cheap and compliant labor in the orchards and canneries of the Valley and the Bay Area motivated producers to encourage an influx 3 46 of immigrant workers to the region. The majority of these new workers arriving in California around the turn of the century were Chinese, and later Japanese.4 After being driven out of the mining camps, many male Chinese workers were employed in the canneries of San Francisco, a burgeoning industry looking for cheap labor. The majority of Chinese residents in San Jose were displaced gold mine or railroad workers.5 Most of these 2,700 Chinese residents began sharecropping and performing stoop labor in the strawberry fields of Santa Clara County. They received a half share of their earnings from each harvest. The land where these Chinese laborers worked was the undesirable marshy lowland area near the Bay (around Alviso), where they labored to reclaim wasteland and plant and harvest the berry crop.6 Between 1870 and 1895, San Jose’s Chinatown was burned down by angry whites two times and rebuilt by Chinese residents each time. Thus, these Chinese immigrant residents of San Jose lived and worked under harsh conditions. This was a classic example of environmental racism: this group of immigrants (who were also people of color) was forced to labor and live in environmentally unhealthy areas, with little control over the natural resources around them, on which they toiled for the profit of white entrepreneurs. By 1900, many Japanese immigrants had settled in San Jose and were living in a farming cluster in the Alviso area, previously worked and occupied by many Chinese.7 Many of these men were married, and their families were able to achieve greater mobility than the Chinese single male workers of the previous generation. The reason for this was the presence of Japanese women, whose labor was fundamental to the family ’s survival and well-being.8 However, Japanese workers soon became militant in pursuit of their rights and conducted many strikes after 1900.9 Like the Chinese, they were immediately targeted for immigration restrictions under the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1906.10 A number of Japanese families also succeeded in purchasing their own land, and the reaction by whites was predictable. Compounding the Gentlemen’s Agreement, Congress passed the Alien Land Act of 1913 (reenacted in 1919) and the federal restriction on further Japanese immigration in 1924. The Alien Land Act made it illegal for non-citizens to purchase land for farming, and like the Foreign Miner’s Tax Law of the 1850s, this legislation also targeted Asian immigrants because they were still denied eligibility for citizenship. More than seventy years after the first wave of Chinese workers arrived in California, anti-Asian sentiment still held sway. Testifying before The Valley of the Heart’s Delight | 47 a Congressional committee in 1925, S. Parker Friselle, a California rancher, complained that the Japanese “do...