From Padres to iPods: A Brief History of the SF Bay Area's Ethnic Changes

— by Keith Carey

According to a December 14, 2004 article in the San Jose Mercury, the San Francisco Bay Area is the "largest center of Asian life in the continental United States," and home to 1,300,000 people of Asian descent. God has brought the nations to this part of the world. The Franciscans reached out to the First Nation people and later the Presbyterians brought the gospel to the early Chinese immigrants.

Though I will try to treat the San Francisco Bay Area as one region, there are two major cities that we will cover. One is San Francisco, the City by the Bay, population 775,000. The other is San Jose, the city of 925,000 that boasts of being the heart of the Silicon Valley. Let us delve into the history of this region, then look at the current situation. Keep in mind how God used immigration to reach new people for Christ.

The Age of Spanish Catholic Missions
In 1542, a Portuguese explorer, unaware, sailed past the foggy entrance to this well-protected bay. In 1579, the infamous Englishman Sir Francis Drake missed it as well. It wasn't until 1769 that a Spanish expedition led by Gaspar de Portola made its way through the now well known San Francisco Bay thinking they were in Monterey!

In 1776, the Spanish established a military fort in San Francisco. Spanish authorities had promised the Franciscan missionary Father Serra that if his patron saint, Francis, "could find them a port," Serra could name his mission and the settlement after the saint. This city by the bay qualified, and they named it San Francisco, after St. Francis.

At first the new mission was a popular location for the Ohlone tribes who had been there for hundreds of years. They enjoyed the protection and the food the mission offered. But in the years to come, the Indians began to flee the mission. Was it because the priests were too harsh? Did they not understand the Catholic doctrine? All we know is that what could have been a place where the Indians heard more of the life of Christ, became a place to avoid. To make matters worse, Native Americans were contracting measles and other illnesses from the European settlers. The wet climate exacerbated the health hazards, and eventually the Church fathers established medical facilities for the Native Americans in San Rafael, a sunnier, drier part of the Bay Area.

The Spaniards established a number of mission stations up and down California's coast, but San Jose was not one of them. El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe was founded in 1777. It was a farming community, designed to provide food for the forts in San Francisco and Monterey. However, they did establish a mission in nearby Santa Clara. Traditionally the region was called the Santa Clara Valley, and it remained a rich farming community for nearly 200 years before it became the world's foremost high-tech center.

The American Era Begins
After Mexico, whose territory included California, became independent of Spain in 1821, the new government secularized the missions. They continued to be used for economic exploits, but their spiritual purpose was lost.

The United States took advantage of the new, weak nation. During the Mexican War in 1846-48, the Americans annexed much of what Mexico had claimed, including California. Though many of the Mexicans went south, this new part of the United States included many Latinos, an ethnic group that has been significant in the Bay Area ever since.

It didn't take long before San Francisco stepped into the limelight. The gold rush began in 1848, and tens of thousands entered San Francisco's port en route to the gold mines. San Franciscans were the ones who "found gold" by selling supplies to the incoming miners, few of whom found any gold!

Among the ones who did not find gold were the Chinese. Though there were gold seekers from all over the world, the Chinese were singled out for exclusion from gold mining. They may not have found gold, but some of them had the opportunity to find God at a time when there were very few Christians in China. The First Presbyterian Church was established in 1849. In 1852, the same year that 20,000 Chinese came to California, missionary William Speer opened the Presbyterian Mission for Chinese in San Francisco. Chinatown was emerging, and the church was there for them.

In 1865, the Central Pacific Railroad Co. recruited Chinese workers for the transcontinental railroad. The Chinese were noted for their hard work, their willingness to obey instructions, and their willingness to work for low wages. But most of them were men who came without their families, and their problems with gambling and prostitution made them undesirable to many European-Americans. The First Presbyterian Church began efforts in San Jose's Chinatown to provide English lessons, food, and aid for Chinese girls who had been sold into prostitution.

Workers from other parts of the world didn't want to compete with the Chinese who would work for far less money. Throughout the remainder of the 19th and the early 20th Century there were sporadic attempts to discriminate against the Chinese. Japanese, Filipino and Indian immigrants faced similar hurdles when they arrived in the Golden State in later decades. Immigration restrictions on the Chinese didn't loosen up until 1949 when 5,000 well-educated Chinese were given refugee status.

After Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia fell to communist rule in the 1970s, "boat people" and other refugees came to the U.S. Almost overnight, businesses that were owned by Latinos were replaced by ones owned by Vietnamese in San Jose. Once again, it was the Presbyterian Church (USA) that reached out to the new Americans with English classes and the opportunity to respond to the gospel. Christians joined together to make sure that their new Southeast Asian neighbors had a gospel witness.

Santa Clara Valley Becomes the "Silicon" Valley
In the last four decades, mission opportunities to unreached people groups began with new White House policies and high-tech entrepreneurs. In 1965, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson signed new immigration laws that prevented "national origins" from being a basis for allocating immigration quotas to various countries. For the first time, the U.S. could not give preferential treatment to European or Latin American immigrants. The only criterion was that the new immigrants had to be well educated.

Meanwhile, in humble garages in Palo Alto and Cupertino, new high-tech startups like Hewlett-Packard and Apple Computers were in their embryonic stages. The Santa Clara Valley, a modest plum and apricot growing region, would soon become the Silicon Valley, the world's computer hub. Aerospace and other high tech industries began there as early as World War II. Palo Alto's Stanford University trained many of the high tech pioneers in their emerging roles. There was even room for immigrants with high tech backgrounds.

Meanwhile, across the globe, India had a problem. When they gained their independence from England in 1947, they set up six institutes of technology in hopes of training an elite corps. As it turned out, India's economy didn't produce enough jobs for graduates. But there were jobs in the Silicon Valley. A Time Magazine article published in April of 2000 said, "Indian employees are believed to make up some one-third of the workforce in the engineering sector of Silicon Valley's largest firms. Not only that, some seven percent of the Valley's high-tech firms are led by an Indian CEO…" There are now about 110,000 Indian nationals in the Bay Area, according to a March 12, 2000 article in the San Francisco Examiner. Almost all of these South Asian immigrants have a good education.

In India, the people who have the best access to education and the least access to the gospel are the high and middle caste Hindus. Who will reach them with the gospel? At this time, there is no clear answer. There are efforts to reach college students and non-Hindu immigrants, but this opportunity might be slipping away. As the high tech "bubble" burst a couple of years ago, dragging the inflated economy down a couple of notches, fewer South Asians are likely to come to the Bay Area. Last summer, there were two articles, one in the New York Times, that suggested that some of the South Asian "techies" are heading back to India where jobs are increasingly available. They are taking with them a taste for the good life of shopping malls and readily available potable water. But so far, there has been no mention of them returning with the Water of Life.

• Pray that Christians in the Bay Area will take up the challenge of reaching their high caste Hindu neighbors.
• Pray that there will be all-out efforts to reach every unreached ethnic group for Christ.