pitti2003devil

Skimming Pitti’s book on January 13, 2013:

  • “migration has been a dynamic force in the Valley, a social process that shaped imperial institutions, native resistance, working-class political activism, and new forms of cultural politics over generations.” (3)

Chapter 8: Silicon Valley

  • “As in the 1940s, few ethnic Mexicans enjoyed runaway success in the Gold Rush atmosphere of the late-twentieth-century Information Age. The Latino community boomed in size after 1960 and came to comprise more than 25 percent of the city by 1990, but its recent history only highlighted the Valley’s greatest constant, the power of race for structuring local political and cultural developments.” (173)
  • “local institutions helped keep Latinos out of the corporate board room. . . . in 1963 a whopping 78 percent of local Spanish-surnamed youth had dropped out of high school before completing their degrees. Thus continued the defacto educational discrimination evident in the Valley and other parts of the Southwest since the twentieth century.” (176)
  • “Women were the primary wage-earners in many ethnic Mexican homes, making the East Side a ’female ghetto’ in the eyes of some observers, and by the mid-1970s Latinos as a group made up nearly 50 percent of the participants in federal poverty programs such as the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). The economic marginality of many ethnic Mexicans was further assured by the decline of the local fruit-processing industry, an employment sector that since the 1940s had provided jobs to many women and men. By 1977 nearly all of the canneries had closed, and this agricultural de-industrialization threw many out of work, a development that hit women hard.” (177)