| This project investigates the social, cultural, and economic impacts of Asian migration to the Santa Clara Valley in California, a premier fruit-growing region now commonly known as "Silicon Valley," during its peak decades of horticultural production, 1880 to 1940. Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigrants contributed to the shaping of agriculture in the "Garden of the World," as well as to residents' understanding of race, gender, and what it meant to be an American family farmer. I argue that the presence of Asians immigrants in the Santa Clara Valley challenged the white family farm ideal, which increasingly became an "othering" device used to racialize Asians.;In the late nineteenth century, whites in the Santa Clara Valley associated fruit orchards with white families, permanence, and settlement, while perceiving the Chinese as sojourning men, disconnected from family ties, and only capable of doing menial agricultural labor in the cultivation of berries, vegetables, and garden seed. This view was extended to Japanese immigrants, most of whom arrived in the 1900s following the decline of the Chinese population and occupied a similar agricultural niche. By the late 1910s, however, the formation and settlement of Japanese farm families who came to operate orchards disrupted the entrenched framework of racialized crops and family structure, igniting allegations of deviant Japanese family labor practices.;Diverging from traditional perspectives on anti-Asian movements, I contend that the specter of Japanese family farming in California was central in the drive to institutionalize discrimination against Asians through immigration exclusion, denial of citizenship, and tougher alien land laws in the 1920s. Ironically, in the aftermath of this surge of legislative discrimination, with few Chinese and Japanese in the Valley and the assurance that no more would be allowed to emigrate, whites adopted positive views of second-generation American-born Asian children. When the Great Depression hit the Valley, public attention shifted away from Japanese family farmers to the plight of dislocated white farm families and the rise of Filipino migrant labor. With each successive wave of Asian immigration, the family farm ideal was deployed to inscribe racial difference and construct boundaries of racial and national identity. |
