The Borders of Citizenship:The Politics of Race and Metropolitan Space in Silicon Valley.

[摘要] This dissertation examines the spatial politics of citizenship and metropolitan development in California’s Santa Clara Valley. After 1945, residential and industrial developers transformed the Valley from an agricultural region to a sprawling metropolis celebrated for its high-tech economy, christened the Silicon Valley. As highly educated immigrants came to work in the computer industry, journalists and boosters portrayed the Silicon Valley as the fulfillment of the American Dream. But this process of metropolitan development displaced Mexican American and Japanese American residents who had lived on the semi-rural fringes of the Valley’s central city, San José. Providing a new approach to scholarship on suburban diversity, this study explains how these residents organized legal and political campaigns for metropolitan civil rights and economic citizenship. Civil rights activists challenged the racial and economic inequalities associated with the Alien Land Laws, racial covenants, mortgage policies, urban renewal, and housing desegregation. Debates about citizenship and civil rights were often debates about how to structure the market, particularly in residential real estate. After 1945, many liberals and civil rights activists espoused a colorblind market vision. They envisioned a system in which class rather than race would structure the market, and in the Valley this developed into a legal geography of suburban class exclusivity and racial inclusivity. During the postwar decades, the Valley’s liberal organizations and civil rights groups campaigned for colorblind policies, particularly in housing law. Liberals and middle-class civil rights activists promoted a discourse of colorblindness that conservatives later adopted.The Valley’s working-class activists articulated a different market vision. Mexican American community activists were the most vocal and the best organized, but they were only part of a broad multiracial movement for economic justice in the Valley. In the 1960s and 1970s, they promoted a vision of metropolitan government that would allow poor people to live in any part of the metropolis and access the public goods that had become increasingly privatized. As educated immigrants from Asia streamed into the Valley, they settled in exclusive suburbs — several of which became majority Asian American — buying into a spatially and economically bifurcated citizenship.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Urban and Suburban History

[关键词] American History;Urban and Suburban History;Ethnic Studies;Civil Rights;California;Legal History;History (General);Humanities;History