Matters of history and memory have taken on new importance as growing numbers of Latinos throughout the United States argue for their political and economic rights. Visions of history guide progressive movements for change. Although none today can claim to remember the early strikes at New Almadén [a mercury mine in Santa Clara County], those whom I interviewed in Valley homes, on rooftops, in bowling alleys, and in cafés did express considerable frustration about the high-tech robber barons so beloved by most of the local press. Many who shared with me their memories had grown angry that popular accounts of the region’s high-tech growth routinely failed to include any mention of Mexicans or Mexican Americans. Their frustration had been building for years, and local Latinos expressed particular outrage in 1990 when Mayor Tom McEnery proposed a statue commemorating Thomas Fallon, a seldom-remembered “pioneer” credited with raising the first American flag in the Valley during the Mexican War. Local white elites, by contrast, considered Fallon an inspiring symbol for the developing Silicon Valley economy. Corporate executives rallied to support the building of this memorial to the city’s Manifest Destiny, and politicians spoke of San José, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Cupertino, and other municipalities as the new business frontier, places free from the constraints of old-style business models, locales where young men and women would find the always elusive California dream.
This was pure romance, a historical cover-up that hid a much uglier past. Many local Latinos continued to criticize journalists who appeared too sanguine about the Valley’s future, too ready to promote the Valley as a place of entrepreneurial freedom, “the Wild Wild West of private enterprise,” and seemingly too intent to forget the longtime Mexican American presence in the area. Like dominated groups elsewhere in the world, ethnic Mexicans have clung for generations to their own counternarratives that explained their place in local society. In drawing attention to past farm labor and cannery work, some continue to contest official narratives of Silicon Valley’s development. Residents who had been activists in the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s have recently led the charge in urging the city to pay greater care to Latino history. Such efforts have developed hand-in-hand with the movement of greater numbers of Mexican Americans into local government. Investigations of the past, these activists have argued, must be a more democratic enterprise, an effort to understand, for example, the “political subordination” of local Latinos begun “in the nineteenth century and continued in the twentieth.” Many have demanded that the Valley celebrate a more multicultural cast of local heroes. After a coalition of Mexican Americans defeated plans to construct the Fallon monument, they managed to see the completion of two new statues located downtown, a memorial to Ernesto Galarza and a statue of the Aztec serpent god Quetzalcoatl.