|
Overview
History
Entertainment guide
Past, Present and
Future, All Side By Side
The San Francisco Bay area has three major urban centres
rather than one enormous one. At the foggy head of the peninsula
is San Francisco, on the east of the bay is Oakland, and in
the sunny south bay is San Jose, a city which has retained
its Spanish colonial and Mexican heritage whilst heading boldly
into the future. The old and the new is visible everywhere.
It is a sprawled out suburban melting pot. All human life
is here, Vietnamese who came to the valley after the fall
of Saigon, Mexicans, Japanese, Irish, British and many many
more. San Jose has a very diverse population, and visitors
will find a dazzling array of cultures and cuisine on display.
History
Contrary to Euro-centric versions of history which talk about
the “first” settlement of California in the 1760s,
the Ohlone Indians lived in the area now known as the Santa
Clara Valley for many centuries beforehand. These people lived
off the land near the Cayote and Guadaloupe Rivers and took
shelter in huts made of grass.
This peaceful existence came to an abrupt halt with the arrival
of the Spaniards in the 18th century and the founding of the
Mission Santa Clara near the Guadaloupe. This was part of
a chain of missions that was being founded as part of a scheme
to consolidate Spanish interests on the West coast. The idea
was to extend Spanish influence further into upper California,
tame the land and secure safe harbours on the coast for the
Spanish navy and merchant galleons plying the route from the
Orient.
The Jesuit order had already established missions in the
south, the Franciscan monks took over from them later. In
1713 Governor Portola and a Franciscan missionary from Mallorca
called Junipero Serra hatched the scheme to keep pushing the
missions northward beyond San Diego. By 1796 there were thirteen
missions between San Diego and San Francisco. It was hoped
by the Franciscans that there would a mission within one day’s
horseback ride of another all the way along El Camino Real
(The Royal Road.) By 1797 five more missions were needed to
complete the chain, and Mission San Jose was the first of
these.
By this time the city of San Jose had already been founded
in 1777 by José Joaquin Moraga as a Spanish military
supply base. It was named Pueblo de San José de Guadaloupe
by Charles III of Spain. It supplied food to the military
garrisons in San Francisco and Monterey during the Spanish
colonial period and afterwards when California became part
of independant Mexico.
The United States eventually conquered California and in
1846 San Jose had a brief stint as state capital which first
convened in 1849. (The capital was later moved to Vallejo
and subsequently to Sacramento where it remains.)
The effects of the 1849 California gold rush helped to boost
the area. Not everyone was able to strike gold, but they were
able to work the land in this very hospitable climate. Orchards
sprang up all over the place and before long San Jose was
establishing itself as a centre of fruit production processing
produce from the orchards of the Santa Clara valley, and the
arrival of the railroad in 1864 further improved its trade
links with San Francisco.
This agricultural activity continued until the post-war years
when the boom in consumer goods and new advances in cheaper
aircraft technology and electronics caused an influx of investment
in the area as firms set up shop near Stanford University
at Palo Alto and the US Naval Air Station at Moffett Field
in Sunnyvale.
The advent of Silicon Valley saw the next big jump in San
Jose’s fortunes, between 1960 and 1980 the city’s
population nearly tripled and today it stands at around 1
million.
The bursting of the dot-com bubble was the end of a huge
party, a few years which saw unprecedented growth and unparalleled
prosperity. Those heady days may be over, but the underlying
strengths of San Jose are still there. The high-tech industry
that built its modern success will never go away because the
technology cannot be uninvented.
|
