Silicon Valley Unseen: As Told By Locals

KQED’s Silicon Valley Unseen is a series of photo essays, original reporting and underreported histories that survey the tech capital’s overlooked communities and subcultures from a local perspective.

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or most of my life, when someone’s asked where I’m from, I’ve avoided saying “Silicon Valley.”

Instead, I’ve opted for a term more representative of my Bay Area upbringing: the South Bay. “Silicon Valley” and all it connotes is just too one-dimensional, too narrow-minded to hold the layered realities that have shaped my community.

The name Silicon Valley dates back to 1971, when journalist Don Hoefler coined it in a series about Santa Clara County’s booming semiconductor industry. In the decades since, its promise has been lionized worldwide.

To outsiders, Silicon Valley is seen as the world’s biggest gold mine in the digital age. Whereas the pick-and-axe Gold Rush once attracted runaways and rogues westward in the mid-1800s, this tech boom signaled white collar excellence and limitless profiteering laced with uber-innovative thinking — a modern algorithm that has spawned replicas in Tel Aviv, London, Austin and Zhongguancun.

But this pristine, mainstream portrayal blithely ignores its de facto caste system. For every office building, there are tireless custodians who stay after hours to clean up, and security guards whose shifts begin at midnight. At local parks, groups of Spanish-speaking nannies gather while raising tech workers’ children. Silicon Valley is where you’ll see a scissor-door Lamborghini casually parked in a bland strip mall — right next to an Uber food delivery driver in a Toyota with a missing front bumper.

As the son of Mexican immigrants, I’ve spent decades trying to understand the reverence others project onto my imperfect hometown. I’m someone who grew up surrounded by these privileges yet still fell through the institutional cracks.

I went to a high school where some students lived in the hills and sported a rotation of BMWs and Mercedes, while others lived with eight undocumented family members doing their best to get by on minimum wage and avoid deportation. I observed these disparities as someone in the middle, with access to both worlds. Constantly toggling between extremes warped my sense of place. I eventually gravitated towards graffiti, attended community college and read up on the Black Panther Party.

In 2007, I left Mountain View (now known as the home of Google) for Berkeley in pursuit of art, education and personal growth. I eventually exited California entirely, and never planned on returning to Silicon Valley. But recently I moved back to my old neighborhood, right next to Highway 101 and Moffett Field. And the changes are enormous.

Gone are any bounce houses and taco trucks; any lowrider bikes and tinted windows on low-sitting Lexuses and Mustangs; any aspiring Chicano rappers at the nearby park; any Samoan, Vietnamese and Filipino house parties. They’ve mostly been replaced by empty holograms and dollar signs. There isn’t much space and affordability for anything else these days, it seems.

Headlines about my hometown make it seem like the world’s biggest capitalist theme park rather than an actual community of everyday people: “If Silicon Valley Were a Country, It Would Be Among the Richest on Earth.” “Inside the Opulent World of Six-Figure Kids Birthday Parties in Silicon Valley.” “Inside Apple’s Insanely Great (or Just Insane) New Mothership.” 

Who gets to tell stories about Silicon Valley? And what do those stories reveal about who we really are? Perhaps more than ever, as the architectures of displacement continue to spread in every direction and the ongoing tides of entities like OpenAI encroach, there’s an urgency for preservation. For humanized connection.

This week on KQED, local activists, small business owners, car club enthusiasts, photographers, reporters, poets, filmmakers, rappers, radio hosts and longtime community members will converge to share our homegrown views about Silicon Valley — in our own words.

For too long, our region’s ordinary beauties and people have gone unseen.

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y dad never goes to San Francisco’s Mission or Oakland’s Fruitvale — two of Northern California’s most celebrated Mexican and Central American neighborhoods — to order his favorite pupusas. He doesn’t have to.

His pupusas of choice are served by a Salvadoran woman who lives on a tree-lined suburban cul-de-sac in Mountain View.

In front of a shanty home that remains as a vestige from the South Bay’s centuries of fruit orchard prominence, this señora slangs distinctly Salvadoran staples: pupusas, curtido, salsa roja, frijoles and arroz. Her offerings aren’t particularly creative, and she’s not the kind of trendy, underground TikTok food celebrity that attracts buzzing lines.

Primarily, she’s simply trying to survive the economic reality of Silicon Valley, a land where some people own Cybertrucks, and others ride public transit and help assemble Teslas in nearby factories. Silicon Valley isn’t the attractive, vibrant center of a major metropolis. It’s a sleepy stretch of homes that resemble just about any other suburb in the country, except that property values are measured by the multi-millions.

This is the largest centrifugal cluster of moguldom on the planet. Google, Apple, Uber, Facebook, Waymo, LinkedIn, Netflix and Lockheed Martin are all within 15 miles from my front door. These surrounding corporations — rather than the hardworking residents who live here — are what get cared for and invested in.

Our pupusera prepares her homemade meals in a gravel driveway near a Google satellite campus, right beside a parked trailer where an immigrant Honduran handyman lives because rent in this zip code is too expensive to afford an actual bedroom. (The renovated house across the street from the pupusera is now valued at just shy of $4 million).

My dad arrived in the San Francisco Peninsula from Mexico as a middle school dropout. Like so many who cross the border into the United States, he sought opportunity. He enrolled at College of San Mateo while working nights as a restaurant cook near campus; miraculously, he managed to complete a program in mechanical design. My dad had known nothing about it, only that a recruiter from a nearby company visited his class and a counselor had encouraged him to sign up. 

Prior to that, my dad, Nacho, was a free-floating hippie. By all accounts — from stories I’ve heard and photos I’ve unearthed — he was a marijuana-loving, laissez-faire artist who rocked a Mexican afro and wore a leather vest. A man who’d wandered off from a family of 12 siblings in Veracruz to chase something — anything — somewhere else. He’d never used or seen a computer before. In a recent conversation, when I asked what his plan had been upon reaching California, he told me he didn’t have one.

That all changed in Silicon Valley. Due to the fateful intersection of time, place and skills, my dad landed a gig in the early tech workforce as someone who could sketch detailed computer parts by hand. (He worked for a company that no longer exists, inside a building that has since been converted into Facebook’s headquarters). Back then, computer parts were drafted by pencil as illustrations. If there’s one thing my dad could do, it was drawing. Nearly four decades later, he does similar work, though he uses a computer now. It pays the bills, he enjoys it, and he never complains. I admire him for being able to plug into the system and reap the rewards of his immigrant scrappiness. By those metrics, he crushed it in life.

Plus, his life in tech has provided me and my older brother with invaluable tools. I remember when my dad got a computer at our first apartment, back in the days of floppy discs and MS-DOS in the mid-’90s. At the time, I thought it was part of normal childhood. Looking back, it’s clear I grew up with immediate access to technologies that my peers would later come to depend upon and even worship. It was a perk of being inside Silicon Valley, if only on the cultural fringes.

Try to imagine an unqualified Mexican immigrant waltzing into Silicon Valley for a lifelong career in tech these days. That backdoor has since been locked.

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irt bikers popping twelve-o’clock wheelies at rush hour. That’s what you might see in East Palo Alto (EPA) — a redlined city off the eastern ramp of Highway 101, whose primary street leads directly to Stanford’s finely manicured campus. As one of Silicon Valley Unseen’s eight collaborators, EPA-raised photographer Darius Riley rides around on his skateboard, capturing local sights and faces. He provides a glimpse into this ever-evolving community historically alienated from Silicon Valley.

Across the Dumbarton Bridge from EPA, you’ll find Fremont. The city marks the northeasternmost edge of Silicon Valley, home to a host of tech companies, including Tesla. More importantly, it’s a tranquil suburb known for its Indian cuisine, Afghan community and high-ranking safety. Recently, Fremont has provided the setting for popular films like Dìdi and Fremont. East Bay journalist Supriya Yelimeli dives into it all in a reflection on her own upbringing as a first-generation Indian American in the country’s “happiest city.”

From there, you’ll hop on 880, swerving past Union City and Milpitas toward the aortic valve of Silicon Valley: San Jose. 

“Shark City” has multiple regions — East Side, West Side and South — each an ecosystem unto itself. In Japantown, you’ll hear from the Vietnamese American owner of a clothing boutique about what defines her sense of Silicon Valley fashion (and where to thrift shop). On San Jose’s East Side, you’ll meet folks like Jiggy Joe Fresco and Pro Tribe’s Stretch. As KQED reporter Pendarvis Harshaw learns over the span of his ride-alongs, the 408’s rap hustle parallels what he has seen in his own community in East Oakland.

Alex Knowbody takes over from there. A Mexican American photographer who spends his weekends at PayPal Park — home to the Bay Area’s only professional soccer clubs, the Earthquakes and Bay FC — he embraces the area’s fútbol passions. His photos reveal the sport’s deep legacy, proving Silicon Valley has long been an underrated hotbed for U.S. soccer.

Coming back up 101, crossing 237 (sorry, Cupertino and Campbell), you’ll zing past Alvarado and Santa Clara to reach Sunnyvale, home of Dueñas, an all-women’s lowrider club. The group’s founder Angel tells us how it all started, and why Silicon Valley is the undisputed lowrider mecca.

Your last stop is in Mountain View, where KMEL’s hip-hop radio host G-Biz moved after growing up in East Palo Alto. At one point, Gary and I were neighbors, and attended the same high school. He explains what the area means to him and his family after they moved from Arkansas.

And me? I went back to a 47-year-old Iranian market that has flourished near downtown Mountain View since my childhood. After being forced out of business for a few years, Rose Market is still supplying some of the best lahori chicken and basmati rice with saffron and zereshk. I weigh in on what they’ve meant to me, and hear from nearby Iranian American filmmaker Mohammed Gorjestani about both the importance and shortcomings of immigrant nostalgia.

To be born and bred in Silicon Valley is not to be enamored or mesmerized by it. On the contrary, it’s to be at once skeptical and open-hearted; to remain simultaneously inspired and disillusioned. It’s to understand that while this region has been the site of so many life-altering tech trends, it has obscured — if not completely dismissed — everyone doing the day-to-day working and living underneath it all.

I’m from here. We all are. And in the mighty words of Alex Knowbody: “There was a culture here before tech, and there will be a culture here after it, too.”