| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Stephen J. Pitti. The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2003. Pp. xiv, 297. $29.95. Glenna Matthews. Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2003. Pp. xvii, 313. Cloth $55.00, paper $22.95.
These two books provide sober correctives to popular celebrations of California's Silicon Valley and its high-tech economy of the 1980s. Although their emphases differ slightly, authors Stephen J. Pitti and Glenna Matthews use analyses of race, gender, and class to counter myths about the wealth generated in the region.	1
Stephen J. Pitti's title refers to the "devil" of racism as viewed through the perspectives of the valley's largely working-class Mexican-American inhabitants. He suggests that they, and not computer programmers or business magnates, should be at the center of histories of the Santa Clara Valley. While Matthews portrays Mexican Americans as only one element of the working classes of the valley, her history also concentrates on workers' often frustrated pursuit of a "good life," symbolized by frequent use of the term "the California Dream." Both authors are interested in the poverty and political conflicts expunged from boosters' portraits of the valley, past and present. For Matthews, the central question for historians is how a region that generated so much wealth, for so long, also distributed it so unevenly. More than Pitti, she is concerned with how gender complicated the path to the California Dream, while also briefly in the 1970s making the valley known nationwide for its feminist leadership. Yet Matthews would also agree with Pitti on one important point: the defeat of unionization—begun among cannery workers in the 1930s—destroyed the most plausible foundation from which more recent generations of valley workers might have confronted the high-tech and globalized economy of the past two decades.	2
Pitti's book offers a detailed, broad-ranging history of ethnic Mexicans in the Santa Clara Valley. It serves to correct a Mexican-American historiography that has focused almost exclusively on southern California. Pitti argues that northern California has been too dynamic economically to be ignored by historians of ethnic minorities. His analysis focuses on the entwining of economic development, racism, and the formation of racialized Mexican communities over two centuries. It begins with the arrival of the Spanish and the development of a ranching economy under Spanish and then Mexican rule, but its main focus is the period after conquest by the United States. It traces the work, communities, and political movements of Mexican Americans, migrant workers, and immigrants as the valley economy was successively transformed by Americans' investment in, first, large-scale wheat cultivation and quicksilver mining and, later, extensive orchards and canning operations. Only in the last chapter of the book is the reader introduced to the new economy that labeled the region "Silicon Valley."	3
The heart of the book is a series of chapters focused on ethnic Mexican workers in mining, agriculture, and canning. Pitti traces the changing forms of political mobilization that accompanied labor in each sector during its era of predominance. Miners mobilized around a persisting interest in Mexico, nationalist Cinco de Mayo celebrations, and mutual aid associations that could, on occasion, support resistance and strikes even among transnationally mobile workers. The orchard/cannery economy that emerged in the late nineteenth century facilitated the expansion but also the segregation of a Mexican community that in turn made possible the amazing burst of union organization and activism of the 1930s. The employment of braceros, along with the nationalist passions of wartime (persisting into the Cold War), broke the power of the most important cannery union, the UCAPAWA (United Cannery, Agricultural, Packinghouse, and Allied Workers of America). Nevertheless, the legacy of union activism provided the example, and created a cadre of activists, that would support new initiatives to organize farm workers and to seek local political power and civil rights after 1960.	. . .

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